Michael Collins Welsh (23 November 1926 – 20 January 2012) was a coal miner and Labour Party politician from South Yorkshire in England. He sat in the House of Commons from 1979 to 1992. Welsh was educated at elementary schools, at the University of Sheffield and at Ruskin College in Oxford. He was a local councillor from 1962, and was elected at the 1979 general election as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labour safe seat of Don Valley, sponsored by National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). In 1981, when the NUM in Yorkshire began to demand that its five sponsored MPs should support the unions' policies, Welsh was reported by The Times as the only one who was sufficiently left-wing to retain the union's support. In the 1981 Labour Party deputy leadership election in 1981, Welsh voted for