Karen Whitefield is a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 politician and former Member of the Scottish Parliament

Member of the Scottish Parliament

Member of the Scottish Parliament is the title given to any one of the 129 individuals elected to serve in the Scottish Parliament.-Methods of Election:MSPs are elected in one of two ways:...

 for the Airdrie and Shotts

Airdrie and Shotts (Scottish Parliament constituency)

Airdrie and Shotts is a constituency of the Scottish Parliament. It elects one Member of the Scottish Parliament by the plurality method of election...

 constituency.

Prior to her election as MSP she worked as a personal assistant to Rachel Squire

Rachel Squire

Rachel Anne Squire was a British Labour Party politician in Scotland. She was the Member of Parliament for Dunfermline West from 1992 to 2005, and then for Dunfermline and West Fife from 2005 until her death after a long series of illnesses.-Background:Squire was born in Carshalton, Surrey, England...

, Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

.

As an MSP she chaired the Parliament's

Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament is the devolved national, unicameral legislature of Scotland, located in the Holyrood area of the capital, Edinburgh. The Parliament, informally referred to as "Holyrood", is a democratically elected body comprising 129 members known as Members of the Scottish Parliament...

 Education Committee where she used her casting vote to reject the student graduate endowment bill, a Scottish National Party

Scottish National Party

The Scottish National Party is a social-democratic political party in Scotland which campaigns for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom....

 (SNP) flagship policy. It had the backing of the Liberal Democrats

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats are a social liberal political party in the United Kingdom which supports constitutional and electoral reform, progressive taxation, wealth taxation, human rights laws, cultural liberalism, banking reform and civil liberties .The party was formed in 1988 by a merger of the...

 and SNP members, however not the Labour

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

 or Conservative members of the committee The bill was eventually passed through the Scottish Parliament

Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament is the devolved national, unicameral legislature of Scotland, located in the Holyrood area of the capital, Edinburgh. The Parliament, informally referred to as "Holyrood", is a democratically elected body comprising 129 members known as Members of the Scottish Parliament...

 by a vote of 67 to 61.

Whitefield was Scottish Labour's shadow Minister for Children in the Scottish Parliament and Convener of the Cross-Party Group on Diabetes under Iain Gray.

At the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, she lost her seat to the SNP's Alex Neil. She was one of nine Labour MSP's to lose their constituency seats after holding them since the first elections to the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

External links

• Karen Whitefield personal site
• Karen Whitefield profile at the site of Scottish Labour