- published: 13 Jun 2010
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- author: noname1209
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- Abel Matutes
- Agnostic
- Albert Booth
- Albert Coppé
- Aneurin Bevan
- Ann Clwyd
- Anthony Crosland
- Antonio Tajani
- Arthur Greenwood
- Arthur Henderson
- Arthur Scargill
- BBC
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Cardiff
Cardiff (
i/ˈkɑrdɪf/; Welsh: Caerdydd (info) Welsh pronunciation: [kairˈdiːð, kaˑɨrˈdɨːð]) is the capital and largest city in Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for Wales. The unitary authority area's mid 2010 population was estimated to be 341,054, while the population of the Larger Urban Zone was estimated at 861,400 in 2009. Cardiff is a significant tourism centre and the most popular visitor destination in Wales with 18.3 million visitors in 2010. In 2011, Cardiff was ranked 6th in the world in National Geographic's alternative tourist destinations.
The city of Cardiff is the county town of the historic county of Glamorgan (and later South Glamorgan). Cardiff is part of the Eurocities network of the largest European cities. The Cardiff Urban Area covers a slightly larger area outside of the county boundary, and includes the towns of Dinas Powys and Penarth. A small town until the early 19th century, its prominence as a major port for the transport of coal following the arrival of industry in the region contributed to its rise as a major city.
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Delaware
Delaware (i/ˈdɛləwɛər/ DEL-ə-wair) is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, to the northeast by New Jersey, and to the north by Pennsylvania. The state takes its name from Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman and Virginia's first colonial governor, after whom what is now called Cape Henlopen was originally named.
Delaware is located in the northeastern portion of the Delmarva Peninsula and is the second least extensive, the sixth least populous, but the sixth most densely populated of the 50 United States. Delaware is divided into three counties. From north to south, these three counties are New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. While the southern two counties have historically been predominantly agricultural, New Castle County has been more industrialized.
The history of the state's economic and industrial development is closely tied to the impact of the Du Pont family, founders and scions of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the world’s largest chemical companies.
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European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.
The Commission operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "commissioners" ). There is one member per member state, though members are bound to represent the interests of the EU as a whole rather than their home state. One of the 27 is the Commission President (currently José Manuel Durão Barroso) proposed by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament. The Council then appoints the other 26 members of the Commission in agreement with the nominated President, and then the 27 members as a single body are subject to a vote of approval by the European Parliament. The first Barroso Commission took office in late 2004 and its successor, under the same President, took office in 2010.
The term "Commission" is used either in the narrow sense of the 27-member College of Commissioners (or College) or to also include the administrative body of about 23,000 European civil servants who are split into departments called Directorates-General and Services. The internal working languages of the Commission are English, French and German. The Members of the Commission and their "cabinets" (immediate teams) are based in the Berlaymont building of Brussels.
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Great Orme
Coordinates: 53°20′0″N 3°51′20″W / 53.333333°N 3.85556°W / 53.333333; -3.85556
The Great Orme (Welsh: Y Gogarth or Pen y Gogarth) is a prominent limestone headland on the north coast of Wales situated in Llandudno. It is referred to as Cyngreawdr Fynydd in a poem by the 12th century poet Gwalchmai ap Meilyr. It is echoed by the Little Orme, a smaller but very similar limestone headland, which is on the eastern side of Llandudno Bay in the parish of Llanrhos. It was used as a course at the Wales Rally GB 2011.
The Great Orme is run as a nature reserve by the Conwy County Borough Countryside Service, with a number of protective designations (including Special Area of Conservation, Heritage Coast, Country Park, and Site of Special Scientific Interest), being an area 2 miles (3.2 km) long by 1 mile (1.6 km) wide. It is home to a long-established herd of about two hundredferal Kashmir goats (acquired from Queen Victoria). There are numerous paths for walking on the summit, including a section of the North Wales Path, a long distance route. About half the Great Orme is in use as farmland, mostly for sheep grazing.
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House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster.
The House of Lords is independent from, and complements the work of, the House of Commons – they share responsibility for making laws and checking government action. Bills can be introduced into either the House of Lords or the House of Commons and members of the Lords may also take on roles as Government Ministers.
Unlike the House of Commons, most new members of the House of Lords are appointed. Membership of the House of Lords is made up of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal. There are currently 26 Lords Spiritual, who sit in the Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical role in the established Church of England. The Lords Temporal make up the rest of the membership; of these, the majority are life peers who are appointed by the Monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister, or on the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
Membership was once a right of birth to hereditary peers but, following a series of reforms, only 92 members (as of 1 July 2011 (2011 -07-01)[update]) sitting by virtue of a hereditary peerage remain. The number of members is not fixed; as of 1 April 2012 (2012 -04-01)[update] the House of Lords has 786 members (plus 21 who are on leave of absence or otherwise disqualified from sitting), as against the fixed 650-seat membership of the House of Commons.
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Iowa
Iowa (i/ˈaɪ.əwə/) is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New France. After the Louisiana Purchase, settlers laid the foundation for an agriculture-based economy in the heart of the Corn Belt. Iowa is often known as the "Food Capital of the World".
In the latter half of the 20th century, Iowa's agricultural economy transitioned to a diversified economy of advanced manufacturing, processing, financial services, biotechnology, and green energy production. Iowa is the 26th most extensive and the 30th most populous of the 50 United States. Its capital and largest city is Des Moines. Iowa has been listed as one of the safest states to live in.
Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east; the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west; the northern boundary is a line along 43 degrees, 30 minutes north latitude. The southern border is the Des Moines River and a not-quite-straight line along approximately 40 degrees 35 minutes north, as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Missouri v. Iowa after a standoff between Missouri and Iowa known as the Honey War.
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Liverpool
Liverpool (
/ˈlɪvəpuːl/) is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Liverpool was 445,200 and was part of a larger urban area of 816,216.
Historically a part of Lancashire, the urbanisation and expansion of Liverpool were both largely brought about by the city's status as a major port. By the 18th century, trade from the West Indies, Ireland and mainland Europe coupled with close links with the Atlantic Slave Trade furthered the economic expansion of Liverpool. By the early 19th century, 40% of the world's trade passed through Liverpool's docks, contributing to Liverpool's rise as a major city.
Inhabitants of Liverpool are referred to as Liverpudlians but are also colloquially known as "Scousers", in reference to the local dish known as "scouse", a form of stew. The word "Scouse" has also become synonymous with the Liverpool accent and dialect. Liverpool's status as a port city has contributed to its diverse population, which, historically, were drawn from a wide range of peoples, cultures, and religions, particularly those from Ireland. The city is also home to the oldest Black African community in the country and the oldest Chinese community in Europe.
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Llandudno
Coordinates: 53°19′N 3°49′W / 53.32°N 3.82°W / 53.32; -3.82
Llandudno (Welsh pronunciation: [ɬanˈdɪdnɔ]) is a seaside resort and town in Conwy County Borough, Wales. In the 2001 UK census it had a population of 20,090 including that of Penrhyn Bay and Penrhynside, which are within the Llandudno Community.
Llandudno, "Queen of the Welsh Resorts", a title first implied as early as 1864, is now the largest seaside resort in Wales, and lies on a flat isthmus of sand between the Welsh mainland and the Great Orme peninsula. Llandudno was formerly in the district of Aberconwy within Gwynedd, and until 1974 was in Caernarfonshire.
The town of Llandudno developed from stone age, bronze age and Iron Age settlements over many hundreds of years on the slopes of the limestone headland, known to seafarers as the Great Orme and to landsmen as the Creuddyn peninsula. The origins in recorded history are with the Manor of Gogarth conveyed by King Edward I to Annan, Bishop of Bangor in 1284. The manor comprised three townships, Y Gogarth in the south-west, Y Cyngreawdr in the north (with the parish church of St. Tudno) and Yn Wyddfid in the south-east.
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M4 motorway
The M4 motorway links London with South Wales. It is part of the unsigned European route E30. Other major places along the route include Reading, Swindon, Bristol, Newport, Cardiff and Swansea. Originally referred to as the London-South Wales Motorway, the English section was constructed between 1965 and 1971, the Welsh section was completed in 1993 and the Second Severn Crossing opened in 1996.
The M4 runs close to the A4 from London to Bristol. After crossing the River Severn it follows the A48 through South Wales, using the Brynglas Tunnels at Junction 25a, Newport and terminates just north of Pontarddulais. The route of the M4 is known as the M4 corridor.
A new road from London to South Wales was first proposed in the 1930s, and the Ministry of Transport announced plans for the M4 as one of the first major post-war trunk road improvement projects in 1956.
The Chiswick Flyover opened in 1959. However it was not originally classed as a motorway. The Maidenhead bypass opened in 1961 whilst J1-J5 opened in 1965. From J18 to the west of Newport was opened in 1966 and included the Severn Bridge (now part of the M48). The Port Talbot by-pass, also built in the 1960s and now part of the M4, was originally the A48(M) motorway, a number now allocated to a short section of motorway near Cardiff. The Ministry of Transport originally intended that the M4 would terminate at Tredegar Park west of Newport, and it was only following the creation of the Welsh Office that the Government became committed to a high-standard dual carriageway to Pont Abraham in Carmarthenshire.
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Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone (i/siːˌɛrə liːˈoʊn/), officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the northeast, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. Sierra Leone is a constitutional representative democratic republic and covers a total area of 71,740 km2 (27,699 sq mi) Sierra Leone has a tropical climate, with a diverse environment ranging from savannah to rainforests. As of 2011, Sierra Leone has an estimated population of 6 million[1] (2011 United Nations estimte). Freetown is the capital, largest city as well as its economic, commercial, educational, cultural and political centre. Bo is the country's second largest city and the second major economic and commercial centre.
Sierra Leone is divided into four geographical regions: the Northern Province, Eastern Province, Southern Province and the Western Area; which are subdivided into fourteen districts. The districts have their own directly elected local government known as district council, headed by a council chairman. The country's six municipalities of Freetown, Bo, Kenema, Makeni, Koidu Town and the coastal town of Bonthe have their own directly elected city councils headed by mayors.
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Tredegar
Coordinates: 51°46′39″N 3°14′26″W / 51.77761°N 3.24069°W / 51.77761; -3.24069
Tredegar (pronounced /trɪˈdiːɡə/) is a town situated on the Sirhowy River in the county borough of Blaenau Gwent, in south-east Wales. Located within the historic boundaries of Monmouthshire, it became an early centre of the Industrial Revolution in South Wales. The historic Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, United States was named in honour of the town.
The name Tredegar can be explained as tref deg erw. Deg erw is Welsh for "ten acres" or "ten-acre"; tref means "town", although its original meaning was "farm" or "estate."[citation needed]
Tredegar grew as a developed town thanks to the natural resources it had within the Sirhowy Valley, namely:
Hence by the start of the 1700s, the upper Sirhowy Valley was a natural well wooded valley, consisting of a few farms and the occasional small iron works where iron ore and coal naturally had occurred together.
The first recorded iron works in the Sirhowy Valley was Pont Gwaith Yr Hearn, developed by two Bretons and worked by men from Penydarren, Merthyr Tydfil. The Sirhowy Iron Works was erected in 1750 by Mr Kettle of Shropshire. In 1778 Kettle sold this ironworks to Thomas Atkinson and William Barrow, who came to the area from London. They developed it as the first coal fired furnace, so men were employed to dig coal at Bryn Bach and Nantybwch, the first small scale coal mining operation in the area. The furnace and hence the business failed in 1794. This created the new Sirhowy Ironworks, that were in 1800 to become the Tredegar Iron Company, named in honour of the Tredegar Estate at Tredegar House and Tredegar Park in Newport in the south of the county.
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Tufnell Park
Tufnell Park is an area of north London, England which straddles the border of the London Borough of Islington and the London Borough of Camden.
Tufnell Park Road runs along the line of an old Roman road which stretches from the Roman camp beneath Barclays Bank and Batten's Carpets on the Holloway Road, up Dartmouth Hill and over Hampstead Heath. For centuries the area was renowned for its dairy farms which kept London and the south supplied with milk.
It kept a rural air well into the 19th century in its important role as a base for a number of dairies supplying the capital. In 1753 the area became the property of William Tufnell who was granted the manor of Barnsbury by his father-in-law Sir William Halton. The manor (now demolished) stood on the site of the Holloway Odeon. The manor's gateposts can still be seen, however, towards the west end of Tufnell Park Road. Tufnell petitioned parliament for permission to develop his estate but the leases he was granted were left unused. William's father was Samuel Tufnell of Langleys in Essex. William also inherited Nun Monkton in Yorkshire and estates in Northumberland from his great-uncle, Nathaniel Payler. He also inherited Pleshy from his godfather William Joliffe. These estates went to his older brother John Jolliffe Tufnell of Langleys.
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Abel Matutes
Abel Matutes y Juan is a Spanish politician who served as Spain's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 6 May 1996 to 2000. Matutes was born in Ibiza on 31 October 1941 and his early political life was in that region. He was Mayor of Ibiza in 1970 and 1971 and became Senator for Ibiza and Formentera in 1977. In 1982 Matutes left the Senate and became a member of the Spanish Parliament, representing the Balearic Islands until 1985.
In 1986, Matutes became a member of the Commission of the European Community (the Delors Commission), where he was in charge of the departments of Credit and Investment, Financial Engineering and Policy for Small and Medium Enterprises, North-South relations, Mediterranean Policy,and Relations with Latin America and Asia. In 1993 his brief changed to Transportation, Energy and the Supply Agency for Euratom.
He was a member of the European Parliament and spokesman for the Partido Popular at the European Parliament from 1994 onwards. As a Founder Chairman of the Balaerics' "Unió Liberal" Party. He was also deputy chairman of Alianza Popular and is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Partido Popular.
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Albert Booth
Albert Edward Booth (28 May 1928 – 6 February 2010) was a British Labour Party politician.
Booth was educated at Marine School, South Shields and Rutherford College of Technology (Northumbria University). He was a design draughtsman. He served as a councillor on Tynemouth Council 1962-65.
Booth contested Tynemouth in 1964. He was Member of Parliament for Barrow-in-Furness from 1966 to 1983. After boundary changes, his seat was renamed Barrow and Furness, but he lost it to the Conservative Cecil Franks. Booth was Secretary of State for Employment from 1976 to 1979 serving under James Callaghan.
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Albert Coppé
Albert Coppé (Bruges 26 November 1911 - Tervuren, 30 March 1999) was a Belgian and European politician and economist. He was a founding member of the CDV party and served in the European Commission as Commissioner for Social Affairs, Transport & Budget under the Malfatti & Mansholt Commissions. He also led an interim High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community in 1967.
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Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin "Nye" Bevan (pronounced /əˈnaɪrɪn/; Welsh: [aˈnəɨ.rin]; 15 November 1897 – 6 July 1960) was a Welsh Labour Party politician who was the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1959 until his death in 1960. The son of a coal miner, Bevan was a lifelong champion of social justice and the rights of working people. He was a long-time Member of Parliament (MP), representing Ebbw Vale for 31 years, and became recognised as one of the leaders of the party’s left wing, and of left-wing British thought generally. His most famous accomplishment came when, as Minister of Health in the post-war Attlee government, he spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, which provides medical care free at point-of-need to all Britons.
Bevan was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, in the South Wales Valleys and on the northern edge of the South Wales coalfield, the son of miner David Bevan and Phoebe née Prothero, a seamstress. Both Bevan's parents were Nonconformists; his father was a Baptist and his mother a Methodist. One of ten children, Bevan did poorly at school and his academic performance was so bad that his headmaster made him repeat a year. At age 13, Bevan left school and began working in the local Tytryst Colliery. David Bevan had been a supporter of the Liberal Party in his youth, but was converted to socialism by the writings of Robert Blatchford in the Clarion and joined the Independent Labour Party.
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Ann Clwyd
Ann Clwyd Roberts (born 21 March 1937) is a Welsh Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Cynon Valley since 1984.
Ann Clwyd is the daughter of Gwilym Henri Lewis and Elizabeth Ann Lewis. She lived in Pentre Halkyn in Flintshire and attended Holywell Grammar School (now Holywell High School), the independent Queen's School in Chester and the University College of Wales in Bangor. She was a student teacher at Hope School in Flintshire. She worked as a journalist, working for the BBC as a studio manager and then became Welsh correspondent for the Guardian and Observer newspapers during 1964-79. She was Vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Wales from 1975-79. She is a member of the NUJ and TGWU.
She was persuaded to stand for Parliament by Huw T. Edwards, who felt that there should be more women in parliament. She was the unsuccessful Labour candidate in Denbigh in 1970 and Gloucester in October 1974. From 1979 to 1984, Ann Clwyd was MEP for Mid and West Wales. She was elected to Parliament in a by-election in May 1984 following the death of Ioan Evans and became the first woman to sit for a Welsh valleys constituency. She served as Shadow Minister of Education and Women's Rights from 1987 but was sacked in 1988 for rebelling against the party whip on further spending on nuclear weapons. She returned as Shadow Secretary of State for Overseas Development from 1989 to 1992 and then served as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales in 1992 and for National Heritage from 1992 to 1993.
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Anthony Crosland
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland (29 August 1918 – 19 February 1977), otherwise Tony Crosland or C.A.R. Crosland, was a British Labour Party politician and author. He served as Member of Parliament for South Gloucestershire and later for Great Grimsby. Throughout his long career he occupied the cabinet positions of Secretary of State for Education and Science, President of the Board of Trade, Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning and Foreign Secretary.
Crosland was born at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. His father, Joseph Beardsall Crosland, was a senior official at the War Office. Both his parents were members of the Exclusive Raven Taylor Plymouth Brethren. His maternal grandfather was Frederick Edward Raven (1837–1903), founder of the Raven Exclusive Brethren and secretary of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. He grew up in North London and was educated at Highgate School and at Trinity College, Oxford. After obtaining 2nd class honours in Classical Moderations in Greek and Latin Literature, and his Masters, Crosland served as a paratrooper in Europe during the Second World War, from 1940, reaching the rank of Captain.
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Antonio Tajani
Antonio Tajani (born 4 August 1953, in Rome) is an Italian politician. He is the current European Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship and has also been one of the five Vice-President of the European Commission since May 2008.
After attending a classical high school in Rome, he earned a degree in Law at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Tajani was an official in the Italian Air Forces. After attending a specialized air defense course, he became radar controller.
Tajani has been a professional journalist, editor of parliamentary affairs for the weekly "Il settimanale", presenter of Rai Radio 1 news programme, and head of the Rome editorial office of the newspaper "Il Giornale", owned by the Berlusconi family. He was special envoy to Lebanon, the Soviet Union and Somalia.
He is married with two children.
In his youth Tajani was a militant of Fronte Monarchico Giovanile (Youth Monarchist Front), a student organization of the Monarchist party of Italy. Even later, he has always advocated for the return from exile of the House of Savoy (banned according to the Italian Constitution)
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Arthur Greenwood
Arthur Greenwood CH (8 February 1880 – 9 June 1954) was a prominent member of the Labour Party from the 1920s until the late 1940s. He rose to prominence within the party as secretary of its research department from 1920 and served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in the short-lived Labour government of 1924. In 1940, he was instrumental in resolving that Britain would continue fighting Nazi Germany in World War II. He was also noted for problems with alcoholism.
Greenwood became deputy leader of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee. Arguably his most famous moment came on 2 September 1939 when, acting for an absent Attlee, he was called to respond to Neville Chamberlain's ambivalent speech on whether Britain would aid Poland. Preparing to respond, he was interrupted by an angry Conservative backbencher, Leo Amery, who exclaimed "Speak for England, Arthur!" A flustered Greenwood proceeded to denounce Chamberlain's remarks, to the applause of his colleagues. When the wartime coalition government was formed, Winston Churchill appointed him to the British War Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio in 1940. He was generally seen as ineffectual, but in May 1940 he emerged as Churchill's strongest and most vocal supporter in the lengthy War Cabinet debates on whether to accept or reject a peace offer from Germany. Without the vote in favour of fighting on by Greenwood and Clement Attlee, Churchill would not have had the slim majority he needed to do so.
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Arthur Henderson
Arthur Henderson (20 September 1863 – 20 October 1935) was a British iron moulder and Labour politician. He was the first Labour cabinet minister, the 1934 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and served three terms as the Leader of the Labour Party.
Arthur Henderson was born at 10 Paterson Street, Anderston, Glasgow, Scotland in 1863, the illegitimate son of Agnes Henderson, a domestic servant. Agnes later married and she and her young son moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England.
Henderson worked in a locomotive factory from the age of 12. After finishing his apprenticeship at seventeen, Arthur Henderson moved to Southampton for a year and then returned to work as an iron moulder (a type of foundryman) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He converted to Methodism (having previously been a Congregationalist) in 1879. This had a major impact on Henderson and he became a lay preacher. In 1884, Henderson lost his job, and concentrated on his education, and preaching commitments.
However by 1892, Henderson had entered the complex world of Trade Union politics, when he was elected as a paid organiser for the Iron Founders Union, and was also a representative on the North East Conciliation Board.
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Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British politician and trade unionist who was president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002, leading the union through the 1984/85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history. A former Labour Party member, he is now the leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.
Scargill was born in Worsbrough Dale, Barnsley, Yorkshire. His father, Harold, was a miner and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His mother Alice (née Pickering) was a professional cook. Arthur was doted on by his parents as he was an only child, and his mother had previously been told that she was unable to have children[citation needed]. He did not take the Eleven Plus exam and went to Worsbrough Dale School (now called the Elmhirst School), leaving at 15 to become a coal miner at Woolley Colliery from 1953, where he became the pit delegate ten years later. Scargill was a member of the Young Communist League from 1955 to 1962, when he joined the Labour Party.
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Bruce Millan
Bruce Millan (born 5 October 1927) is a Scottish Labour politician. He was born in Dundee and educated at the Harris Academy in that city.
He was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Glasgow Craigton at the 1959 general election and served for that seat, and after its abolition for Glasgow Govan, until 1988. He served in the Wilson Government of 1964–70 as Under-Secretary of State for the Air Force from 1964 to 1966, and as Under-Secretary of State for Scotland from 1966 to 1970, and in the Callaghan government of 1976–1979 as Secretary of State for Scotland.
In 1988 he left Parliament, by applying for the Chiltern Hundreds, to take up the post of European Commissioner for Regional Policy and Cohesion which he held until 1995. The vacancy he left was filled by Jim Sillars of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the notable Glasgow Govan by-election of 1988.
In 1999–2001 he chaired the Millan Committee which proposed reforms to the provision of Mental Health care in Scotland.
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Catherine Ashton
Catherine Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC (born 20 March 1956) is a British Labour politician who in 2009 became the European Union's High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Under the Treaty of Lisbon this post is combined with the post of Vice-President of the European Commission.
Her political career began in 1999 when she was created a Life Peer (Baroness Ashton of Upholland) by the Labour Government under which she took on a ministerial position (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State) in the Department for Education and Skills in 2001, and subsequently in the Department for Constitutional Affairs and Ministry of Justice. She became a Privy Councillor PC in May 2006.
Catherine Ashton was appointed Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Queen's Privy Council in Gordon Brown’s first Cabinet in June 2007. As well as Leader of the Lords, she held responsibility in the House of Lords for equalities issues, and she was instrumental in steering the EU's Treaty of Lisbon through the UK's upper chamber. In 2008, she succeeded Peter Mandelson as Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission.
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Chris Patten
Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC (born 12 May 1944) is a British Conservative politician and administrator. He is the current chairman of the BBC Trust, and was the last Governor of British Hong Kong.
Patten was Member of Parliament for Bath, eventually rising to a cabinet minister and party chairman. In the latter capacity, he orchestrated the Conservatives' unexpected fourth consecutive electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat in the House of Commons. He then accepted the post of Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hong Kong, and oversaw its handover to the People's Republic of China in July 1997. As Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Patten presided over a steady rise in the living standards of ordinary Hong Kongers while encouraging a significant expansion of Hong Kong's social welfare system.
From 2000 to 2004 he served as one of the United Kingdom's two members of the European Commission. After leaving that post, he returned to the UK and became the Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 2003, and he was made a Life Peer in 2005.
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Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was a British Labour politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was also the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister, under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill's Conservative Party in 1945. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term, and the first to command a Labour majority in Parliament.
The government he led put in place the post-war settlement, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created – aspirations that had been outlined in the wartime Beveridge Report. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of major industries and public utilities as well as the creation of the National Health Service. After initial Conservative opposition to Keynesian fiscal policy, this settlement was broadly accepted by all parties until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979.
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David Owen
David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen CH PC FRCP (born 2 July 1938) is a British politician.
Owen served as British Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979, the youngest person in over forty years to hold the post; he co-authored the failed Vance-Owen and Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans offered during the Bosnian War. In 1981, Owen was one of the "Gang of Four" who left the Labour Party to found the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Owen led the SDP from 1983 to 1987, and the continuing SDP from 1988 to 1990. He sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.
In the course of his career, Owen has held, and resigned from, a number of senior posts. He first quit as Labour's spokesman on defence in 1972 in protest at the Labour leader Harold Wilson's attitude to the EEC; he left the Labour Shadow cabinet over the same issue later; and over unilateral disarmament in November 1980 when Michael Foot became Labour leader. He resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected one member, one vote in February 1981 and later as Leader of the Social Democratic Party, which he had helped to found, after the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party.
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Denis Healey
Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey CH, MBE, PC, MC (born 30 August 1917) is a retired British Labour politician, who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.
Healey was born in Mottingham, London, but moved with his family to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he was five. His middle name is in honour of Winston Churchill.
Healey was one of three siblings. His father was an engineer who worked his way up from humble origins studying at night school. His paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Ireland. Healey was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Greats where he was involved in Labour politics, although he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. At Oxford Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Terror but left in 1940 after the fall of France. Also at Oxford, Healey met future Conservative Prime Minister Teddy Heath (as he was then known), whom he succeeded as president of Balliol College Junior Common Room and who was to be a life-long friend and political rival. Healey achieved a double first for his degree, awarded in 1940.
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Dennis Skinner
Dennis Edward Skinner (born 11 February 1932) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolsover since 1970, the Chairman of the Labour Party from 1988 to 1989, and has sat on the National Executive Committee numerous times since 1978.
Born in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, Skinner is the third of nine children of coal miner Edward Skinner, who was sacked after the 1926 general strike. Skinner himself worked as a miner for over 20 years, during which he became a NUM leader and Clay Cross Labour Party councillor. He is known for his left-wing views, acid tongue and for never missing a Commons session.
He is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.
Skinner was educated at Tupton Hall Grammar School (now Tupton Hall School) after passing the Eleven-plus a year early. He worked in the mines from 1949 to 1970, at Parkhouse Colliery in Clay Cross until it closed in 1962, then at Glapwell Colliery near Chesterfield. He joined the Labour Party in 1956.
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Derek Hatton
Derek 'Degsy' Hatton (born 17 January 1948 in Liverpool) is a broadcaster, businessman and after-dinner speaker. He won celebrity status as a local politician in Liverpool during the 1980s, where he was deputy leader of the city council, and a supporter of the Trotskyist Militant tendency.
He attended Liverpool Institute for Boys from 1959 to 1964, having passed the 11 plus examination. His subsequent academic success was limited, but he enjoyed sports and appeared on stage as Gratiano in a school production of Merchant of Venice with the future theatre producer Bill Kenwright.
By then a fireman by occupation, Hatton became a member of the Labour Party and later the high-profile deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in 1983. Hatton was the most vocal, prominent member of the council's leadership and a member of Militant tendency, a Trotskyist organisation then pursuing entryist tactics within the Labour Party. The Leader of the council, John Hamilton, was a quietly spoken but much admired and passionate non-Militant socialist member, with great standing in the Liverpool party.[citation needed]
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Diana Holland
Diana Holland is a British trade unionist who is the Assistant General Secretary of Unite and the Treasurer of the Labour Party.
Holland was awarded the OBE in the 2001 New Year Honours, for "services to Equal Opportunities in Employment".
In 2006, Holland served as Chair of the International Transport Workers' Federation women's committee, and was also national organiser for women, race and equalities for the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU). The TGWU subsequently merged into Unite, and Holland became its Assistant General Secretary, in which post she took a leading role in negotiations around the 2012 fuel tanker drivers' dispute.
She has also served as President of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions.
As of July 2010, Holland has been a Labour Party member for over 25 years with 16 years on the National Executive Committee, the longest continuously elected NEC member. She is a member of Islington North CLP.
Holland was elected as Labour Party Treasurer in September 2010, defeating John Prescott. Holland won 68.96% of the total vote, with 19.02% out of 50% in the individual members section of the electoral college and 49.93% out of 50% in the trade union affiliates section.
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Don Touhig
James Donnelly Touhig, Baron Touhig,PC, KSS (born 5 December 1947) is a British Labour Co-operative politician from Wales. He was the Member of Parliament for Islwyn from 1995 until his retirement in 2010.
He went to St Francis RC School in Abersychan near Pontypool, then the Mid Gwent College (now Coleg Gwent) in Pontypool. Before entering parliament, he had been a journalist from 1968-76. From 1976-90, he was the Editor of the Free Press of Monmouthshire (Monmouth Free Press). From 1988-92, he was the General Manager and Editor-in-Chief of the Free Press Group of newspapers. He was the General Manager (business development) of the Bailey Group from 1992-3, then of Bailey Print from 1993-5. He served on Gwent County Council from 1973-95. He joined the TGWU in 1962 and the Labour Party in 1966.
He contested the Richmond and Barnes seat in the 1992 general election. He was elected to Parliament in a by-election on 16 February 1995, to replace Neil Kinnock (party leader from 1983 to 1992), who had resigned. From 1996-7, he was on the Welsh Affairs Select Committee. He served as parliamentary private secretary to Gordon Brown and as a whip before becoming a minister. He had to resign in 1999 when he confessed to receiving a leaked Social Security Select Committee report on Child benefit. He was later suspended for three days from the Commons. He was succeeded by John Healey. He was a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence, with special responsibility for veterans, but left government in the May 2006 reshuffle. He was made a Member of the Privy Council on 19 July 2006.
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Ed Miliband
Edward Samuel Miliband (born 24 December 1969) is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the South Yorkshire constituency of Doncaster North since 2005 and served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He and his brother, David Miliband, were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley, and Oliver Stanley in 1938.
Born in London, Miliband graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford and the London School of Economics, becoming first a television journalist and then a Labour Party researcher, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's confidants and Chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers.
As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown appointed Miliband as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 28 June 2007. He was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 3 October 2008 to 11 May 2010. On 25 September 2010, he was elected Leader of the Labour Party.
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Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms, and head of the 54-member Commonwealth of Nations. She is also head of state of the Crown Dependencies.
Elizabeth was born in London, and educated privately at home. Her father acceded to the throne as George VI in 1936 on the abdication of his brother Edward VIII. She began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, in which she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. On the death of her father in 1952, she became Head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Her coronation service in 1953 was the first to be televised. Between 1956 and 1992, the number of her realms varied as territories gained independence and some realms became republics. Today, in addition to the first four aforementioned countries, Elizabeth is Queen of Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.
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Eric Heffer
Eric Samuel Heffer (12 January 1922 – 27 May 1991) was a British socialist politician. He was Labour Member of Parliament for Liverpool Walton from 1964 until his death. His working-class background and consciousness fed in to his left-wing politics, but to an extent disguised the depth of his knowledge: with 12,000 books in his home, he admitted to being a bibliophile. Due to his experience as a professional joiner, he made a speciality of the construction industry and its employment practices, but was also concerned with trade union issues in general. He changed his view on the European Common Market from being an outspoken supporter to an outspoken opponent, and served a brief period in government in the mid-1970s. His later career was dominated by his contribution to debates within the Labour Party and he defended Liverpool against attacks on the far left-dominated Liverpool City Council.
Heffer was born in Hertford into a family which was thoroughly working-class. His grandfather was a bricklayer and later a railway signalman, and his father was a boot-maker and repairer, although he owned his own business. In later life Heffer proudly declared "I am therefore completely proletarian in background". Heffer's family were members of the High church tendency of the Church of England, and Heffer himself was a choirboy in the local church: it was there that Heffer led his first strike at the age of 8, and, he said, first experienced victimisation by his employer. Despite growing up in the 1930s, his family did not experience much of the economic privations common in other parts of the country. Typically for a working-class boy he attended school at Longmore Senior School, Hertford, only until the age of 14.
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Erkki Liikanen
Erkki Liikanen (born 19 September 1950, Mikkeli) is a Finnish social democratic politician and the Governor of the Bank of Finland .
Erkki Liikanen had a Masters degree in Political Science (Economics) from the University of Helsinki in 1975. He was elected to the Parliament in 1972 when he was only 21 years old. He left the Parliament in 1990 to become the first Finnish ambassador to the European Union.
In 1994 Liikanen became the first Finnish Member of the European Commission. He was Commissioner for Budget, Personnel and administration, including responsibilities for translation and information technology.[citation needed]
He has been Governor of the Bank of Finland since 12 July 2004. He is also Member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (2004– ) and Governor of the International Monetary Fund for Finland (2004– ).[citation needed]
Liikanen has been the chairman of Finnish Red Cross since June 2008. He is married to Hanna-Liisa Liikanen and they have two daughters.[citation needed]
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Frederick Willey
Frederick Thomas Willey (13 November 1910 – 13 December 1987) was a British Labour politician.
Willey was educated at Johnston School and St. John's College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar in 1936. He worked as a barrister on the Northern circuit. His political career began in the 1930s as an activist for social justice and other left wing causes: he was the keynote speaker welcoming returning International Brigade volunteers to Sunderland.
During World War II, Willey served with the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) and was an officer of the Fire Brigades Union.
Willey was elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Sunderland in 1945, when the Borough still sent two MPs to Parliament.
In 1950, two-member constituencies were abolished and Willey was returned for the new constituency of Sunderland North where he served until he retired at the 1983 general election.
Not confined to the backbenches, Willey served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food in 1950-51 and as Minister of Land and Natural Resources, and in the latter capacity opened the UK's first long-distance footpath, the Pennine Way, in 1965.
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George Lansbury
George Lansbury (21 February 1859 – 7 May 1940) was a British politician, socialist, Christian pacifist and newspaper editor. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1910 to 1912 and from 1922 to 1940, and leader of the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935.
He was a campaigner for social justice and improved living and employment conditions for the working class, especially in London's East End.
His earliest political involvement was with the Liberal Party, which he joined in 1886. He acted as electoral agent for Samuel Montagu in Whitechapel at the General Election of 1886, and for Jane Cobden, who stood for election to the London County Council as a Liberal candidate in 1889. That year Lansbury took up the issue of pressing for a legal eight-hour day, but after failing to secure the support of the National Liberal Federation at their 1889 conference he became increasingly disillusioned by the Liberals. He came into contact with the Social Democratic Federation and, in support of the famous 1889 Dock Strike, joined the recently formed Gas Workers' and General Labourers' Union.
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George Lathan
George Lathan (5 August 1875 – 14 June 1942) was a British trade unionist and politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Park from 1929 to 1931 and from 1935 until his death.
Lathan worked on the railways where he became an active trade unionist and joined the Independent Labour Party. He became President of the Railway Clerks Association from 1906 until 1912, when he became its Chief Assistant Secretary, a post he held until 1937.
Lathan also joined the Labour Party, and at the 1918 general election, stood unsuccessfully in Watford. From 1921 until 1936, Lathan was a member of the Railways National Wages Board. From 1921 until 1937, he was the President of the National Federation of Professional Workers.
Lathan continued to stand for Parliament. In 1922 he was defeated in Enfield, then in 1923 and 1924 he stood in Sheffield Park, finally winning the seat in 1929. He lost the seat in 1931, but retook it in 1935. He served as the Chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee in 1931/2 and party treasurer from 1936 until his death.
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George Nicoll Barnes
George Nicoll Barnes CH PC (2 January 1859 – 21 April 1940) was a Scottish politician and a leader of the Labour Party.
Barnes was born in Lochee, Dundee, the second of five sons of James Barnes, a skilled engineer and mill manager from Yorkshire, and his wife, Catherine Adam Langlands. The family moved back to England and settled at Ponders End in Middlesex, where his father managed a jute mill in which George himself began working at the age of eleven, after attending a church school at Enfield Highway. He then spent two years as an engineering apprentice, first at Powis James of Lambeth then at Parker's foundry, Dundee. After finishing his apprenticeship he worked for two years at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow before returning once again to the London area, where he experienced unemployment during the slump of 1879. He had a number of short-term jobs before settling for eight years at Lucas and Airds in Fulham. In 1882 he married Jessie, daughter of Thomas Langlands, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
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George Wardle
George James Wardle CH (15 May 1865 - 18 June 1947) was a British politician. He was editor of the Railway Review and, in 1906, was elected a Labour Member of Parliament for Stockport. At the 1916 Labour Party conference, he made a speech which resulted in the conference passing resolutions as to the party stand on World War I, something the party leader Ramsay MacDonald had failed to establish. He was a founding member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1917, and between 1917 and 1919 he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. In the 1918 General Election he stood, and was elected as, a Coalition Labour candidate. He resigned as a Member of Parliament on 9 March 1920 by becoming Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds.
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Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007, becoming the longest-serving holder of that office in modern history. Brown has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1983, for Dunfermline East until 2005, and currently for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.
Brown became Prime Minister on 27 June 2007, after the resignation of Tony Blair and three days after becoming Leader of the governing Labour Party. His tenure ended on 11 May 2010, when he resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. Brown was one of only three people to serve in the Cabinet continuously from Labour's victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010, the others being Jack Straw and Alistair Darling.
Brown has a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1983; first for Dunfermline East and since 2005 for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. As Prime Minister, he also held the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and the Minister for the Civil Service.
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Günter Verheugen
Günter Verheugen (born 28 April 1944) is a German politician who served as European Commissioner for Enlargement from 1999 to 2004 and then as European Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry from 2004 to 2010. He was also one of five vice-presidents of the 27-member Barroso Commission (Barroso I). After his retirement he is now honorary Professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder).
Born at Bad Kreuznach in Rhineland-Palatinate, Verheugen studied history, sociology and political science at the University of Cologne and at the University of Bonn. He was secretary general of the FDP (liberals) from 1978 to 1982. He left the FDP with many left-liberal party members in 1982, because the FDP left the government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In the same year he joined the SPD (social democrats).
In 1983 he became member of the federal parliament. He was member of the committee on foreign relations from 1983 to 1998. From 1994 to 1997 he was deputy chairman of the parliamentary group of the SPD. He served as minister of state in the department of foreign affairs from 1998 to 1999. In 1999 he left parliament and became EU commissioner for Enlargement of the European Union.
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Harold Finch
Sir Harold Josiah Finch (2 May 1898 – 1979) was a Welsh Labour Party politician born in Barry, Glamorgan.
A miners' agent in Blackwood after the First World War, Finch was a contemporary of Aneurin Bevan and accompanied him as a miners' delegate to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool in 1925. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Bedwellty at the 1950 general election and was Under-secretary of State at the Welsh Office from 1964 to 1966 during Harold Wilson's first administration. He held the seat until he retired from the House of Commons at the 1970 general election. His successor was Neil Kinnock, who later became leader of the Labour Party.
Harold Finch was knighted in the 1976 in the Queen's Birthday Honours for his services to politics and the trade union movement. He was the first 'Freeman' of Islwyn Borough Council and the Sir Harold Finch Memorial Park was created in 1982 at Pontllanfraith.[citation needed]
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Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British Labour politician and Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the February 1974 general election resulted in a hung parliament. He is the most recent British Prime Minister to have served non-consecutive terms.
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Harriet Harman
Harriet Ruth Harman QC (Hon.) (born 30 July 1950), is a British Labour Party politician, who is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Camberwell and Peckham, and was MP for the predecessor Peckham constituency from 1982 to 1997. She was the interim Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 11 May to 25 September 2010, until Ed Miliband took over the role.
In 2007, she was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and served in the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and Minister for Women and Equality from 2007 to 2010. Following the resignation of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Labour Leader on 11 May 2010 following his failure to win the general election (which ended in a hung parliament) five days earlier, Harman became interim Party Leader and interim Leader of the Opposition. She served in both roles until the Labour Party elected Ed Miliband Leader.
Miliband appointed her Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and in the 2011 reshuffle, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. She acts as stand-in Leader during Prime Minister's Questions during Milliband's absences, and shadows current Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg during Deputy Prime Minister's Questions. She is currently the longest continuously serving female MP in the House of Commons.
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Harry Enfield
Henry Richard "Harry" Enfield (born 30 May 1961) is a BAFTA-winning English comedian, actor, writer and director.
Born in Horsham, West Sussex, he is the oldest of three children, the son of English television, radio and newspaper journalist and presenter Edward Enfield. He has two sisters, Elizabeth (born 1966) and Lucy Katherine (born 1969). He was educated at the independent Arundale School in Pulborough, Dorset House School, Worth School, Collyer's Sixth Form College (all in West Sussex) and the University of York, where he was a member of Derwent College and read politics. He worked for a while as a milkman.
Enfield first came to public attention when appearing on Channel 4's Saturday Live as several different characters created with Paul Whitehouse. These quickly entered the national consciousness. Among these characters were Stavros, a Greek restaurant owner with fractured English; and Loadsamoney, an obnoxious character who constantly boasted about how much money he earned. Loadsamoney spawned a hit single in 1988 and a sell-out live tour. As a foil to Loadsamoney Enfield and Whitehouse created the Geordie "Bugger-All-Money" and in 1988 Enfield appeared as both characters during the Nelson Mandela Birthday Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium. In time Whitehouse and Enfield became disturbed that Loadsamoney was being seen in a positive light, rather than as a satirical figure, and they had him run over during a Comic Relief Red Nose Day show while leaving the studio after presenting host Lenny Henry with "the biggest cheque of the night"—a physically huge cheque for ten pence.
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Harry Nicholas
Herbert Richard Nicholas (13 March 1905–15 April 1997) was a trade unionist and political organiser.
Born in Bristol, Nicholas worked for the Port of Bristol Authority until 1936, when he took a full-time post in the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU). He moved to London to become National Officer in 1940, and in 1956 rose to become Assistant General Secretary. In the same year, he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and from 1960 to 1964 he was the party treasurer, appointed in order to maximise trade union donations.
Frank Cousins, General Secretary of the TGWU, served as Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966, and during this period, Nicholas became Acting General Secretary, also serving on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. In 1967, he returned to the Labour NEC. He took early retirement from the union in 1968 to become General Secretary of the Labour Party, having been offered the post by Harold Wilson after several other candidates refused the position.
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Herbert Morrison
Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth, CH, PC (3 January 1888 – 6 March 1965) was a British Labour politician; he held a various number of senior positions in the Cabinet, including Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister.
Morrison was the son of a police constable and was born in Lambeth, London. As a baby he lost the sight in his right eye due to infection. Like many early Labour leaders, he had little in the way of formal education and left school at 14 to become an errand boy. His early politics were radical, and he briefly flirted with the Social Democratic Federation over the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As a conscientious objector, he worked in a market garden in Letchworth in World War I.
Morrison eventually became a pioneer leader in the London Labour Party. He was elected to the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney in 1919 when the Labour Party won control of the Borough, and he was Mayor in 1920–21. Morrison was a follower of Clapton Orient FC and became a shareholder in the club. He was elected to the London County Council (LCC) in 1922 and at the 1923 general election he became Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney South, but lost that seat the following year when Ramsay MacDonald's first administration lost the general election.
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Hugh Gaitskell
Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell, CBE (9 April 1906 – 18 January 1963) was a British Labour politician, who held Cabinet office in Clement Attlee's governments, and was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963.
He was born in Kensington, London, the third and youngest child of Arthur Gaitskell (1870–1915), of the Indian Civil Service, and Adelaide Mary Gaitskell, née Jamieson (died 1956), whose father, George Jamieson, was consul-general in Shanghai. He was educated at the Dragon School from 1912 to 1919, at Winchester College from 1919 to 1924 and at New College, Oxford from 1924 to 1927, where he gained a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1927.
His serious interest in politics came about as a result of the General Strike of 1926, and he lectured in economics for the Workers' Educational Association to miners in Nottinghamshire. Gaitskell moved to University College London in the early 1930s at the invitation of Noel Hall, and became head of the Department of Political Economy[citation needed] when Hall was appointed Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 1938. He also worked as a tutor at Birkbeck College.
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Hugh Hudson
Hugh Hudson (born 25 August 1936) is an English film director. His best-known international success is the 1981 multiple Academy Award-winning film, Chariots of Fire.
Hudson was born in London, the only son of Jacynth (Ellerton), the second wife of Michael Donaldson-Hudson from Cheswardine in rural north Shropshire. His great-grandfather was Charles Donaldson-Hudson, a one-time member of Parliament for Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire. His paternal ancestors came from Scotland and Cumberland. He was sent to boarding school at the age of 6, and thereafter was educated at Eton College. He completed his National Service in the Royal Armoured Corps as a second lieutenant from the 28 January 1956, and remained as a lieutenant in the Army Reserve of Officers until he was discharged on January 16, 1960.
In the 1960s, after three years of editing documentaries in Paris, Hudson headed a documentary film company with partners Robert Brownjohn and David Camell. The company produced, among others, the documentaries A for Apple, which won a Screenwriter's Guild Award, and The Tortoise and the Hare, which was nominated for a BAFTA award. The company emerged with much success in the 1960s, winning many awards and pioneering a new graphic style for documentary and advertising films.
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Iain McNicol
Iain McNicol (born 17 August 1969) is a British Labour politician and trade unionist. He currently serves as the General Secretary of his party and as National Political Officer of the GMB Union. He has a long history of organising in both the Labour Party and the trade union movement.
McNicol began his involvement in political organising as President of the Student Union at Dundee Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1993.
He then moved to the Labour Party, first in an elected role as National Campaigns and Membership Officer for Labour Students, and then as an organiser and agent from 1994-1997.
Following the Labour Party’s electoral victory in 1997, McNicol served as a research, organisation, and political officer with the Party until 1998, when he joined the GMB Union as the organiser for the its Southern Region.
McNicol continued in that role until 2004, when he was promoted to National Political Officer. He has served in that capacity since, coordinating the political strategy of the union and representing its members’ interests in both the public and private sector.
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Ian Mikardo
Ian Mikardo (9 July 1908 – 6 May 1993), commonly known as Mik, was a British Labour and Co-operative politician. An ardent socialist and a Zionist, he remained a backbencher throughout his four decades in the House of Commons. He was a member of Labour's National Executive Committee from 1950 until 1978, and Chairman of the Labour Party 1970 to 1971.
Mikardo's parents were Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire - his mother from Warsaw, his father from Podolia in Ukraine. They came to London separately around 1900, and married some years later. They worked as tailors and in 1907, they moved to Portsmouth where they were employed repairing uniforms for the Royal Navy. Mikardo was born in Portsmouth the following year. He attended the Beneficial Society's School and the Omega Street School. In 1919, he came top in Portsmouth's pass-list for the eleven plus exam, and went to Portsmouth Southern Secondary School for Boys. From the age of eleven he also attended Aria College, a rabbinical seminary.
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Jack Dormand
John Donkin Dormand, Baron Dormand of Easington (27 August 1919 – 18 December 2003), known as Jack Dormand, was a British educationist and Labour Party politician from the coal mining area of Easington in County Durham, in the north-east of England. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for the Easington constituency from 1970 until his retirement in 1987.
Described as an "old-style centre-right socialist", Dormand was a working-class child who progressed through grammar school education to study at Oxford and Harvard to a career as an educational administrator before entering Parliament at the age 50, where he was noted as an advocate for education and for mining areas. He never achieved ministerial office, but as a skilled administrator he played a significant role as a government whip in the 1970s, and as Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party when the party was in opposition in the 1980s. An atheist and a staunch republican, he reluctantly accepted a life peerage when he retired from the House of Commons and was an active working peer until his death 16 years later.
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Jack Dromey
Jack Dromey (born 21 September 1948) is a British Labour Party politician and trade unionist, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Birmingham Erdington since 2010 General Election. He was appointed Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government in the Ed Miliband shadow frontbench and serves as the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Migration.
He was previously the Deputy General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and the Treasurer of the Labour Party. He was also, for some time, the Secretary of the Brent Trades Council, including when it organised the Grunwick Dispute in 1977. He is married to Harriet Harman, currently the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Shadow International Development Secretary.
Dromey was born to Irish parents in Brent and raised in Kilburn, London.
Dromey married Harriet Harman in 1982 in the borough of Brent, after meeting her on the picket line of the Grunwick dispute in 1977; Harman was legal advisor to the Grunwick Strike Committee. They have two sons (born February 1983 and November 1984) and a daughter (born January 1987). Labour colleague Patricia Hewitt is godmother to one of their children. They have a house in Suffolk, in addition to a home in Herne Hill, South London.
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Jacques Barrot
Jacques Barrot (born 3 February 1937 in Yssingeaux, Haute-Loire) is a French politician, who has served as European Commissioner for Justice (2008–2010), after four years as Commissioner for Transport (2004–2008) and Commissioner for Regional Policy for eight months (2004). He is also one of five vice-presidents of the 27-member Barroso Commission. He previously held various ministerial positions in France, and is a member of the right-wing political party UMP. He was officially approved in his post by the European Parliament on 18 June 2008 with a vote of 489 to 52 with 19 abstentions.
Barrot was a European Commissioner between April 2004 and, serving as Commissioner for Regional Policy in the Prodi Commission before being selected as a Vice-President and Commissioner for Transport in the Barroso Commission.[clarification needed]
He was convicted in a French court of embezzlement in 2000. The case involved the diverting of £2 million of government money to his party. He received an eight month suspended prison sentence. His conviction was automatically erased by a 1995 presidential amnesty.
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Jacques Santer
Jacques Santer (born 18 May 1937 in Wasserbillig) is a Luxembourg politician.
He was finance minister of Luxembourg from 1979 until 1989, and the 22nd Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 1984 to 1995, as a member of the Christian Social People's Party, which has been the leading party in the Luxembourg government since 1979. As Prime Minister of Luxembourg he also led the negotiations on the Single European Act, which effectively set aside the 20-year old Luxembourg Compromise.
Santer became the ninth President of the European Commission in 1995 as a compromise choice between the United Kingdom and a Franco-German alliance, after the Franco-German nominee Jean-Luc Dehaene was vetoed by British prime minister John Major. Santer selection was barely ratified by a European Parliament upset with the process for which Commission presidents are selected.
In the same year, 1995, Santer became the first recipient of the Vision for Europe Award.
Allegations of corruption concerning individual EU-commissioners led to an investigation into administrative failings (incompetence and malpractice) by an independent group of experts. Despite clearing most commissioners, the report stated that they had not found a single person showing the slightest sense of responsibility. Because the implicated commissioners refused to resign and because the President of the European Commission did not have the power to dismiss individual commissioners, Santer and his entire commission resigned on 15 March 1999, the very day of the report's publication (see Santer Commission: Resignation).
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James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC (27 March 1912 – 26 March 2005), was a British Labour politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Commonly known as Jim Callaghan (and nicknamed "Sunny Jim", "Gentleman Jim", "Lucky Jim" or "Big Jim"), Callaghan is the only person to have served in all four of the Great Offices of State: Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary.
Callaghan was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967 during a turbulent period in the British economy in which he had to wrestle with a balance of payments deficit and speculative attacks on the pound sterling. In November 1967, the Government was forced to devalue the pound sterling despite having already denied this would be done, both publicly and to the House of Commons. Callaghan offered to resign, but was persuaded to swap his ministerial post with Roy Jenkins, becoming Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970. In that capacity, Callaghan took the decision to use the Army to support the police in Northern Ireland, after a request from the Northern Ireland Government.
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Jim Griffiths
James "Jim" Griffiths CH (19 September 1890–7 August 1975) was a Welsh Labour politician, trade union leader and the first ever Secretary of State for Wales.
He was born in the strongly Welsh-speaking village of Betws, near Ammanford in Carmarthenshire. The youngest of ten children his father was the local blacksmith. His brother (David Rees Griffiths, 1882–1953) was a notable Welsh poet who took the bardic name of 'Amanwy' after his native valley. Educated at Betws Board School, he left at the age of 13 to work at Ammanford No. 1 colliery (Gwaith Isa'r Betws), where he eventually became Lodge Secretary. Griffiths was a pacifist and while campaigning against the Great War met Winifred Rutley, whom he married in 1918.
He continued his education by attending night school and became an active socialist. He helped establish a branch of the Independent Labour Party in Ammanford in 1908 and soon became its secretary. He went on to occupy the powerful post of secretary of the newly formed Ammanford Trades Council between 1916–1919. At age 29, he left the colliery on a miner's scholarship to the Central Labour College, London, On returning home he worked as Llanelly Labour Party agent, between 1922–1925, before becoming an agent for the Anthracite Miners' Association, 1925–1936, and President of the powerful Miners' Federation of South Wales – The Fed – in the Anthracite district of West Wales between 1934–1936. In 1936, he was elected Labour Member of Parliament (MP)] for the safe seat of Llanelli. Three years later he continued his rise through the Labour movement by getting elected to Labour's National Executive Committee in 1939.
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Joe Biden
Joseph Robinette "Joe" Biden, Jr. (pronunciation: /ˈdʒoʊsɨf rɒbɨˈnɛt ˈbaɪdən/; born November 20, 1942) is the 47th and current Vice President of the United States, serving under President Barack Obama. A Democrat, he was a United States Senator from Delaware from January 3, 1973 until his resignation on January 15, 2009, following his election to the Vice Presidency.
Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and lived there for ten years before moving to Delaware. He became an attorney in 1969, and was elected to a county council in 1970. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and became the sixth-youngest senator in U.S. history. He was re-elected to the Senate six times, was the fourth most senior senator at the time of his resignation, and is the 15th-longest serving Senator in history. Biden was a long-time member and former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. His strong advocacy helped bring about U.S. military assistance and intervention during the Bosnian War. He opposed the Gulf War in 1991. He voted in favor of the Iraq War Resolution in 2002, but later proposed resolutions to alter U.S. strategy there. He has also served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dealing with issues related to drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties, and led creation of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and Violence Against Women Act. He chaired the Judiciary Committee during the contentious U.S. Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
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John Major
Sir John Major, KG, CH, PC, ACIB (born 29 March 1943) is a British Conservative politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He held the posts of Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher and was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon from 1979 to 2001.
Despite Thatcher's "notorious" assertion that "she expected to continue in control as a backseat driver," Major's mild and consensual style was seen as complete contrast to Thatcher's forceful and confrontational manner. Early in his term, he presided over British participation in the First Gulf War (March 1991) and negotiated "Game, Set and Match for Britain" at the Maastricht Treaty (December 1991). Despite the British economy then being in recession he led the Conservatives to a fourth consecutive election victory, winning the most votes in British electoral history in the 1992 general election, albeit with a much reduced majority in the House of Commons. He is to date, the last Conservative leader to win an outright majority in a general election.
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John Prescott
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott (born 31 May 1938) is a British politician who was the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, he represented Hull East as the Labour Member of Parliament from 1970 to 2010. In the 1994 leadership election, he stood for both Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, winning election to the latter office. He was appointed Deputy Prime Minister after Labour's victory in the 1997 election, with an expanded brief as Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions.
A former ship's steward and trade union activist, by the 1980s he was presented as the political link to the working class in a Labour Party increasingly led by modernising, middle-class professionals. In his youth, Prescott managed to overcome the handicap of failing his 11-plus entrance examination for grammar school, going on to graduate from Ruskin College in Oxford. Prescott also developed a reputation as a key conciliator in the often tense relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.
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John Silkin
John Ernest Silkin, PC (18 March 1923 – 26 April 1987) was an English Labour politician and solicitor.
He was the third son of Lewis Silkin, 1st Baron Silkin, and a younger brother of Samuel Silkin, Baron Silkin of Dulwich. He was educated at Dulwich College, the University of Wales, and Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. Silkin served in the Royal Navy (1942–1946). He was commissioned as a sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. in 1943, serving in East Indies Fleet, Eastern Fleet and British Pacific Fleet aboard HMS King George V and HMS Formidable, and ashore at Anderson, Ceylon (FECB). He was promoted to Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. He was demobilised in 1946 and returned to Cambridge.
Silkin was admitted as a solicitor in 1950 and worked for his father's law practice in London.
He contested the seat of St Marylebone at the General Election for the Labour Party in 1950, West Woolwich in 1951 and South Nottingham in 1959. He served as a councillor in the Metropolitan Borough of St Marylebone (1962–1963) and was elected to the House of Commons for the first time in July 1963. He served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Deptford (1963–1974) and for Lewisham, Deptford (1974–1987).
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Karel Van Miert
Karel Van Miert (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈkaː.rəl vɐn ˈmiːrt]) (17 January 1942 – 22 June 2009) was a socialist Flemish politician.
He was born in Oud-Turnhout. He studied at Ghent University (1962–1966) and gained a degree in diplomatic sciences. In 1976 he became adjunct-national secretary of the – at that time – unitary Belgian socialist party. Two years later he became president of the Different Socialist Party. In 1989 he was appointed European commissioner responsible for transport, credit and investment and consumer policy. In 1992 he also became in charge of environment. On 26 May 1992 he was appointed Minister of State. From 1993 till 1999 he served as vice-chairman of the European commission and was responsible for competition policy. In 2001, he was awarded the Vlerick Award. He also worked with Eli Lilly and Company, a global pharmaceutical corporation.
On 22 June 2009, 67-year-old Van Miert died at his home in Beersel, after falling from a garden ladder when he had a cardiac arrest.
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Keir Hardie
James Keir Hardie, Sr. (15 August 1856 – 26 September 1915), was a Scottish socialist and labour leader, and was the first Independent Labour Member of Parliament elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Hardie is regarded as one of the primary founders of the Independent Labour Party as well as the Labour Party of which it later was a part.
James Keir Hardie was born 15 August 1856 in a one-roomed cottage on the western edge of Newhouse, North Lanarkshire, near Holytown, a small town close to Motherwell in Scotland. His mother, Mary Keir, was a domestic servant and his father, David Hardie, was a ship's carpenter. The growing family soon moved to the shipbuilding district of Glasgow, where they made a life in a very difficult financial situation, with his father attempting to maintain continuous employment in the shipyards rather than practicing his trade at sea — never an easy proposition given the boom-and-bust cycle of the industry.
Hardie's first job came at the early age of 7, when he was put to work as a message boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company. Formal schooling henceforth became impossible, but his parents spent evenings teaching him to read and write, skills which proved essential for future self-education. A series of low-paying entry-level jobs followed for the boy, including work as an apprentice in a brass-fitting shop, work for a lithographer, employment in the shipyards heating rivets, and time spent as a message boy for a baker for which he earned 4½ shillings a week.
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Leon Brittan
Leon Brittan, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne QC, PC, DL (born 25 September 1939, North London) is a British barrister, politician and former Conservative Member of Parliament, as well as former member of the European Commission and former Home Secretary of the United Kingdom. His brother is Sir Samuel Brittan, an economics commentator at the Financial Times and financial journalist.
Leon Brittan was born to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and was educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and then Trinity College, Cambridge where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society and Chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association. He started his career as a lawyer. He is a cousin of both Malcolm Rifkind and Mark Ronson.[citation needed]
After unsuccessfully contesting the constituency of North Kensington in 1966 and 1970, he was elected to parliament in the general election of February 1974 for Cleveland and Whitby, and became an opposition spokesman in 1976. He was made a Queen's Counsel in 1978. Between 1979 and 1981 he was Minister of State at the Home Office, and then was made Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a Cabinet position. At the 1983 election he changed his seat to Richmond. He was Home Secretary from 1983 to 1985, and was then moved to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. He resigned over the Westland affair.[citation needed]
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Loyola de Palacio
Loyola de Palacio y del Valle-Lersundi (16 September 1950—13 December 2006) was a Spanish politician. She was one of the first women to rise to political prominence in Spain during the early years of democracy. She was a minister in the Spanish government from 1996 to 1998, and a member of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004. Her sister, Ana Palacio, was Foreign Minister of Spain from 2002 to 2004, and is vice president of the World Bank.
De Palacio was born in Madrid, into an aristocratic Basque family, the eldest of four sisters and three brothers, daughter of Luis María de Palacio y de Palacio, 4th Marqués de Matonte, and wife Luisa Mariana del Valle-Lersundi y del Valle. Her mother Luisa died of lung cancer when she was 22, and she took charge of the family. She was educated at the Lycée Français in Madrid, and studied law at Complutense University.
In 1976, she was a founder member of the right-wing Alianza Popular (later transformed into the Partido Popular) led by Manuel Fraga, and she became the first leader of its youth section, Nuevas Generaciones. Her politics were on the "soft", liberal wing of her party. She was elected to represent Segovia in the upper house of the Spanish Parliament (the Senado) in the June 1986 Spanish general election. She joined the national executive of the Partido Popular in 1989, and was elected as a deputy for Segovia in the lower house (the Congreso de los Diputados) in the October 1989 Spanish general election, remaining in the lower house until 1999. She served as minister of agriculture, fisheries and food in José María Aznar's Partido Popular government that took power after the 1996 Spanish general election.
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Margaret Beckett
Margaret Mary Beckett (née Jackson; born 15 January 1943) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Derby South since 1983, rising to become the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under John Smith, from 18 July 1992 to 12 May 1994, and briefly serving as Leader of the Party following Smith's death. She later served in the Cabinet under Tony Blair, most notably being appointed Foreign Secretary in 2006.
Beckett was first elected to Parliament in 1974 and held junior positions in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. She lost her seat in 1979 but returned to the House of Commons in 1983 and became a senior member of the Labour Party. She was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1992 and was briefly its leader in 1994 following the premature death of John Smith, the first woman to occupy either role.
After Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, Beckett became a member of Tony Blair's Cabinet. Initially the President of the Board of Trade, she was later the Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In 2006, Blair appointed her Foreign Secretary, making her the first woman to hold the position, and—after Margaret Thatcher—the second woman to hold one of the Great Offices of State.
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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, née Roberts (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the longest-serving (1979–1990) British prime minister of the 20th century, and the only woman ever to have held the post. A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which later became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Originally a research chemist before becoming a barrister, Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election and became Leader of the Opposition, as well as the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became prime minister after winning the 1979 general election.
After entering 10 Downing Street, Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives to reverse what she perceived as Britain's precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity during her first years in office waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her re-election in 1983. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge (popularly referred to as "poll tax") was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990, after Michael Heseltine launched a challenge to her leadership.
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Mark Carlisle
Mark Carlisle, Baron Carlisle of Bucklow QC DL PC (7 July 1929 - 14 July 2005) was a Conservative British politician and was Member of Parliament (MP) for Runcorn 1964-1983 and Warrington South 1983-1987. Created a life peer in November 1987, he served as Secretary of State for Education and Science from 1979 until 1981.
He was educated at Radley College in Abingdon, Oxfordshire and the University of Manchester before becoming an MP in 1964 for the Cheshire constituency of Runcorn. He was Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs from 1970-1972 when he became a Minister of State for Home Affairs leaving the job when the Conservatives went out of office in 1974. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1978 before being appointed to the department itself when Margaret Thatcher was elected in May 1979. Former Labour Cabinet Minister Clare Short has said that it was her low opinion of Carlisle, who she worked under as a civil servant persuaded her to enter elected politics herself because she believed she "could do better" than many of the MPs she dealt with.
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Martin Clunes
Alexander Martin Clunes (born 28 November 1961) is an English actor and comedian. Clunes is perhaps best known for his roles as Gary Strang in Men Behaving Badly, Doctor Martin Ellingham in Doc Martin and the title character in Reggie Perrin.
Clunes is the son of the classical actor Alec Clunes, who died of lung cancer when Clunes was eight and a half years old. He has an older sister, Amanda. His mother Daphne, later a board member of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, once worked for Orson Welles. Clunes was educated at two independent secondary schools, the Royal Russell School in Croydon and The Arts Educational Schools, in Chiswick, London.[citation needed]
Clunes served his first role in rep at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, and his first television appearance came in the 1980s Doctor Who story Snakedance as the spoiled Lon. But a sporadic career led to his supplementing his income as a photo model for Gilbert and George, and he can be seen in their 1983 work World.[citation needed]
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Maureen Dowd
Maureen Bridgid Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles. Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter and eventually became an Op-Ed writer for the newspaper in 1995. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration.
Dowd was born the youngest of five children in Washington, D.C. Her father, Mike, worked as a D.C. police inspector while her mother, Peggy, was a homemaker. Dowd graduated from Immaculata High School in 1969. She received a B.A. in English in 1973 from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
Dowd began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time. In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter. She began serving as correspondent in the Times Washington bureau in 1986.
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Michael Foot
Michael Mackintosh Foot, FRSL, PC (23 July 1913 – 3 March 2010) was a British Labour Party politician, journalist and author, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1955 and from 1960 until 1992. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980, and later became the Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983.
Associated with the Labour left for most of his career, he was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and British withdrawal from the European Economic Community. He was first promoted to Cabinet as Employment secretary under Harold Wilson in 1974, and later served as Leader of the House of Commons under James Callaghan. A passionate orator, he was Labour leader at the 1983 general election when the party received its lowest share of the vote since 1918.
His parallel career as a journalist included appointments as editor of Tribune, on several occasions, and the Evening Standard newspaper. Among the books he authored are Guilty Men (an attack on Neville Chamberlain and others for the policy of appeasement), a biography of Jonathan Swift (The Pen and the Sword, 1957) and a biography of Aneurin Bevan.
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Michelle Pfeiffer
Michelle Marie Pfeiffer ( /ˈfaɪfər/; born April 29, 1958) is an American actress. She made her film debut in 1980 in The Hollywood Knights, but first garnered mainstream attention with her performance in Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). Pfeiffer has won numerous awards for her work. She received six consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations, winning the Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama award in 1990 for The Fabulous Baker Boys. She also won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Dangerous Liaisons, and the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Love Field, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards for the same films.
Pfeiffer rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s with critically acclaimed performances in the films Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Married to the Mob (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Russia House (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Love Field (1992), Batman Returns (1992), and The Age of Innocence (1993).
She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 6, 2007. The star is located at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard and is recognised as STAR 2,345.
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Morgan Phillips
Morgan Walter Phillips (18 June 1902-15 January 1963) was a colliery worker and trade union activist who became the General Secretary of the British Labour Party, involved in two of the party's election victories.
Born in Aberdare, Glamorgan, one of the six children of William Phillips, Phillips was brought up in Bargoed. He left school when he was 12 to become a colliery surface worker.
When he was 18, Phillips became a member of the Caerphilly divisional Labour Party, and served as secretary of the party in Bargoed, 1923-25. He was chairman of the Bargoed Steam Coal Lodge, 1924-26. He was able to attend the Labour College, London for a two-year course in economic and social subjects. He remained in London and became secretary of the Labour Party in West Fulham, 1928-30. and later in Whitechapel, 1934-37. He became a councillor on Fulham borough council, 1934-37. In Fulham Labour Party he met Norah Lusher, later Baroness Phillips, whom he married in 1930. They had a son and a daughter. The latter, Gwyneth Dunwoody, was a long-serving Labour MP from 1964 until her death in 2008.
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Neil Kinnock
Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock (born 28 March 1942) is a British politician belonging to the Labour Party. He served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995 and as Labour Leader and Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition from 1983 until 1992—his leadership of the party during nearly nine years (all in opposition) making him the longest serving opposition leader in British political history.
Following Labour's defeat in the 1992 election, Kinnock resigned as party leader and after his departure from the House of Commons three years later served as a European Commissioner from 1995–2004. Until the summer of 2009 he was the Chairman of the British Council. Kinnock served as President of Cardiff University from 1998 until 2009. Today, he is regarded as one of Labour's elder statesmen.
Kinnock, an only child, was born in Tredegar, Wales. His father Gordon Herbert Kinnock was a coal miner who suffered from dermatitis and had to find work as a labourer; and his mother Mary Kinnock was a district nurse. Gordon died of a heart attack in November 1971 aged 64; Mary died the following month aged 61.
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Norman Atkinson
Norman Atkinson (born 25 March 1923) is a British politician who served as Labour Member of Parliament for the London constituency of Tottenham from 1964 until 1987.
Manchester-born, Atkinson was educated at technical school and became a design engineer at Manchester University. He served as a councillor on Manchester City Council 1945-49. He contested Manchester Wythenshawe in 1955 and Altrincham and Sale in 1959, before being elected for Tottenham in the 1964 general election.
A member of Labour's National Executive Committee for five years, Atkinson also served as the party's national tresaurer. As treasurer, he clashed with Chancellor Denis Healey at the 1976 Labour Party Conference. He was a founding member of the Socialist Campaign Group.
He did not contest the 1987 general election, having been deselected by his constituency party (subsequent to boundary changes in 1983 which added roughly half of the old Wood Green constituency) in favour of Bernie Grant.
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Peter Kellner
Peter Jon Kellner (born 2 October 1946) is a journalist, political commentator and President of the YouGov opinion polling organisation in the United Kingdom. He is known for his appearances on TV, especially at election times. He was born in Lewes, educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, Cricklewood (and later Elstree), Minchenden Grammar School, Southgate, north London, and the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and has an MA in Economics and Statistics from King's College, Cambridge.
His maternal grandmother was a Suffragette and his father was a Jewish refugee from Hitler. He has stated that he learned from them that "Politics isn't just about data collection and tables and regression analysis, it's about justice, about truth and about liberty."
Formerly the political analyst of the BBC Newsnight current affairs programme, Kellner was engaged by YouGov's founders, Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi, in December 2001. When YouGov floated for £18 million in April 2005, Kellner owned 6% of the company.
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Peter Mandelson
Peter Benjamin Mandelson, Baron Mandelson, PC (born 21 October 1953) is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hartlepool from 1992 to 2004, served in a number of Cabinet positions under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and was a European Commissioner. He was a key architect in the rebranding of the Labour Party as "New Labour" and its subsequent landslide victory in the 1997 general election.
He twice resigned from Tony Blair's government while holding Cabinet positions. After his second resignation, he served as the European Commissioner for Trade from 2004 to 2008. He rejoined the government when he was made a life peer by the Queen and took his seat in the House of Lords on 13 October 2008.
Peter Mandelson was born in London in 1953, the son of Mary Joyce (née Morrison) and George Norman Mandelson. His father's family was Jewish, and his father was the advertising manager at The Jewish Chronicle. On his mother's side, he is the grandson of Margaret (Kent) and Herbert Morrison, the London County Council leader and Labour cabinet minister. He was educated at Hendon County Grammar School 1965–72. In 1966 he appeared on stage with the local amateur theatre group, the Hampstead Garden Suburb Dramatic Society as the eponymous lead in The Winslow Boy.
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Peter Schmidhuber
Peter Schmidhuber (15 December 1931) is a former German and European politician from the Bavarian CSU party.
Schmidhuber was born in Munich, Bavaria. He studied law and economics at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich from 1951, gaining his license to practice as a lawyer in 1960. Schmidhuber worked from 1961 to 1966 in the Bavarian State Finance Department, then as a legal adviser from 1961 to 1978.
He joined the Christian Social Union in 1952. He was from 1960 to 1966 a member of the Munich City Council, and from 1965 to 1969 and again from 1972 to 1978 a member of the German Bundestag(the lower chamber of the national parliament). On 15 October 1978 he was elected to the Bavarian state parliament, and he remained there until 1987. From 1978 to 1987 he was in the private office of Franz-Josef Strauss while the latter was regional Minister for Federal and European questions. He was also a member, at different times, of the coordination committee between the two chambers of the federal German parliament, and of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
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Peter Shore
Peter David Shore, Baron Shore of Stepney PC (20 May 1924 – 24 September 2001) was a British Labour politician and former Cabinet Minister, noted in part for his opposition to the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community. His idiosyncratic left-wing nationalism led to comparison with the French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement. He was described in an obituary by the Conservative journalist Patrick Cosgrave as "Between Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, the only possible Labour Party leader of whom a Conservative leader had cause to walk in fear."
Born in Great Yarmouth, Shore was the son of a Merchant Navy captain and was brought up in a middle-class environment. He attended the Quarry Bank Grammar School in Liverpool, England, and went from there to King's College, Cambridge, to study history, where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society with an elite membership. During the later stages of World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, spending most time in India.
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Peter Watt
Peter Martin Watt (born 20 July 1969) was the General Secretary of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom from January 2006 until he resigned in November 2007 as a result of the Donorgate affair.
From 1989 to 1992 Watt trained as a nurse at a predecessor institution to Bournemouth University, then worked for Poole Hospital NHS Trust.
He is married and the father of five children as well as a foster carer.
From 1996 he worked for the Labour Party, first as a local organiser for Battersea and Wandsworth, then in Labour Party head office on election delivery and recruitment and then as Regional Director of the Eastern region. In 2004 he gained a Professional Certificate in Management from the Open University.
He returned to the Labour Party head office as Director of Finance and Compliance in 2005, a role that bridges legal and financial party issues and also usually includes a tacit role of enforcing party discipline and sorting out internal disputes. Viewed as loyal to the party leadership, he has on occasion come into conflict with the trade union movement over party policy and organisation, especially apparent at the Labour Party Conference in 2005.
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Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald, PC, FRS (12 October 1866 – 9 November 1937) was a British politician who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority government for two terms.
MacDonald entered Parliament at the 1906 General Election and had become chairman of the Labour MPs by 1914. His opposition to the First World War made him unpopular and he was defeated at the 1918 General Election, returning to Parliament at the 1922 General Election, at which Labour replaced the Liberals as the largest left-wing party in the UK. MacDonald was a powerful if woolly orator and by then had earned great public respect for his opposition to the war. His first government - formed with Liberal support - in 1924 lasted nine months, but was defeated at the 1924 General Election amidst allegations, now thought to have been fabricated, that his government was endorsed by the Soviet Foreign Minister Zinoviev.
Labour returned to power - this time as the largest party - in 1929 but was soon overwhelmed by the crisis of the Great Depression, in which the Labour government was split by demands for public spending cuts to preserve the Gold Standard. In 1931, he formed a National Government in which only two of his Labour colleagues agreed to serve and the majority of whose MPs were from the Conservatives. As a result, MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party, which accused him of "betrayal". The Gold Standard soon had to be abandoned after the Invergordon Mutiny and MacDonald's National Government won a huge "doctor's mandate" at the 1931 General Election, at which the Labour Party was reduced to a rump of around 50 seats in the House of Commons.
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Romano Prodi
Romano Prodi (Italian pronunciation: [roˈmaːno ˈprɔːdi] (
listen); born 9 August 1939) is an Italian politician and statesman. He served as the Prime Minister of Italy, from 17 May 1996 to 21 October 1998 and from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008. He was also the tenth President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.
Prodi ran in 1996 as lead candidate of The Olive Tree coalition, winning the general election and serving as Prime Minister of Italy until 1998. Following the victory of his coalition The Union over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections Prodi was in power again. On 24 January 2008, he lost a vote of confidence in the Senate house, and consequently tendered his resignation as Prime Minister to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, but continued in office for almost four months for routine business, until early elections were held and a new government was formed.
On 14 October 2007, Prodi became the first President of the Democratic Party upon foundation of the party.
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Ron Hayward
Ronald George Hayward CBE (27 June 1917–22 March 1996), known as Ron Hayward, was a leading activist in the British Labour Party.
Born near Chipping Sodbury in Oxfordshire, Hayward served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. At the end of the war, he became the Labour Party's secretary and agent in Banbury. In 1949 he moved to Kent, where he began a friendship with local MP Arthur Bottomley. The following year, Bottomley ensured his appointed as the party's London assistant regional organiser, and in 1959 he became organiser for the Southern region. He served in this role until 1969, when he became National Agent. In 1972, he narrowly defeated Gwyn Morgan to become General Secretary of the Labour Party.
As General Secretary, Hayward opposed entry to the Common Market and supported unilateral nuclear disarmament. He strongly supported the Chilean Revolution, and after its overthrow became friends with Hortensia Bussi, Allende's former wife. Privately, he was very critical of the Labour Party leadership's lack of response to the counter-revolution. In the 1980s he opposed the Militant Tendency, but was reluctant to expel its supporters from the party. He was fiercely opposed to the Gang of Four, who led the split which formed the Social Democratic Party.
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Rosie Barnes
Rosemary Susan "Rosie" Barnes, née Allen, OBE (born 16 May 1946) is an English charity organiser and former politician. She became nationally known when she won a by-election in 1987 for the Social Democratic Party.
Barnes was born in Nottingham and educated at Bilborough Grammar School there, and at the University of Birmingham, where she graduated in Social Sciences and History in 1967. The same year she married Graham Barnes, who later became an accountant and investment company director. They have two sons and one daughter. After briefly becoming a teacher, she worked as a freelance market research consultant.
Having been a Labour voter, although never a member, when the Social Democratic Party was formed in 1981 Barnes and her husband joined it as founder members because they were opposed to the Labour Party's leftward move. She served on the Council for Social Democracy from 1982 as the delegate from Greenwich, and was an SDP candidate in Woolwich in the Inner London Education Authority elections in May 1986.
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Roy Hattersley
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley FRSL (born 28 December 1932) is a British Labour politician, author and journalist from Sheffield. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.
Roy Hattersley has been a socialist and Labour supporter from his youth, electioneering at the age of 12 for his local MP and city councillors, beginning in 1945. His own mother, Enid Hattersley, was a city councillor, and later, Lord Mayor of Sheffield (in 1981). Enid Hattersley kept the fact secret from her son (until he was in his 50s) that his father, who died an atheist, had been a Roman Catholic priest, Father Frederick Hattersley, and had renounced the Church to marry her.
He won a scholarship to Sheffield City Grammar School and went from there to study at the University of Hull. Having been accepted to read English at the University of Leeds, he was diverted into reading Economics when told by a Sheffield colleague of his mother that it was necessary for a political career.
wn.com/Roy_Hattersley -
Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British politician.
The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in Harold Wilson's First Government. As Home Secretary from 1965–1967, he sought to build what he described as "a civilized society", with measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of capital punishment and theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the legalisation of abortion. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1967–1970, he pursued a tight fiscal policy later praised by Margaret Thatcher. In 1970, he was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, but resigned in 1972 because he supported entry to the Common Market, while the party opposed it.
When Wilson re-entered government in 1974 Jenkins returned to the Home Office, but, increasingly disenchanted by the swing to the left of the Labour Party,[citation needed] he chose to leave British politics in 1976 and was appointed President of the European Commission in 1977, serving until 1981: he was the first and to date only British holder of this office. In 1981, dismayed with the Labour Party's continuing leftward drift, he was one of the "Gang of Four" - Labour moderates who formed the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In 1982 he won a famous by-election in a Conservative seat and returned to parliament; but after disappointment with the performance of the SDP in the 1983 election he resigned as SDP leader.
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Rupert Murdoch
Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian American media mogul. Murdoch became managing director of Australia's News Limited, inherited from his father, in 1952. He is the founder, Chairman and CEO of global media holding company the News Corporation, the world's second-largest media conglomerate.
In the 1950s and '60s, he acquired various newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World followed closely by The Sun. He moved to New York in 1974 to expand into the US market and became a naturalised US citizen in 1985. In 1981, he bought The Times, his first British broadsheet.
In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, he consolidated his UK printing operations in Wapping, causing bitter industrial disputes. His News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989) and The Wall Street Journal (2007). He formed BSkyB in 1990 and during the 1990s expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000 Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries with a net worth of over $5 billion.
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Sam McCluskie
Sam McCluskie (11 August 1932–15 September 1995) was a British Labour Party politician and trade unionist. He came from Leith in Edinburgh. He followed Albert Booth as Treasurer of the Labour Party from 1984 to 1992. He was general secretary of the National Union of Seamen from 1986 up to the merger which formed the RMT in 1990. He held a post in that union but retired in 1991.
In 1988, McCluskie recorded a fundraising single with John Prescott.
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Siim Kallas
Siim Kallas (born 2 October 1948 in Tallinn) is an Estonian politician, currently serving as European Commissioner for Transport. He is also one of five vice-presidents of the 27-member Barroso Commission. He has been nominated as commissioner for Transport and vice-president in the second Barroso Commission.
Kallas has been Prime Minister of Estonia, Estonian Minister of Finance, Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and member of the Riigikogu. Kallas is a member and former leader of the free-market liberal Estonian Reform Party. Kallas was a vice-president of Liberal International.
Language skills: Active: Estonian (mother tongue), English (primary working language), Finnish, Russian, German. Passive: French. Married to doctor Kristi Kallas; one son and one daughter Kaja, who is a member of the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu). The ancestors of Siim Kallas were of Estonian and Baltic German origin. Kallas has been an active participant in the restoration of Estonian statehood.
European Parliament Answers to Commissioner Designate M. Kallas
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Stephen Kinnock
The Hon. Stephen Kinnock (born 1 January 1970) is a British executive who held various senior positions with the British Council prior to joining the World Economic Forum in January 2009 as director, head of Europe and Central Asia. He is the son of Neil Kinnock, former leader of the Labour Party and ex-chair of the British Council, and Glenys Kinnock, a former Labour Member of the European Parliament. He is married to the Prime Minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, whom he met when they were both studying at the elite College of Europe in Belgium during 1992–1993.
After attending Drayton Manor High School and having achieved a degree in Modern Languages from Queens' College, University of Cambridge, Stephen Kinnock was a British Council Development and Training Services lobbyist based in Brussels from 1997 when his father was a European Commissioner and was promoted to British Council's Brussels Director in 2002.
Kinnock has been married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt since 1996. The couple have two daughters.
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Syd Tierney
Sydney Tierney (16 September 1923 – 6 March 2010) was a British Labour Party politician and former President of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW).
Tierney joined one of the forerunners of USDAW in 1938 whilst working as a milkman in Rotherham. In 1953 he was appointed a collector/canvasser based in Sheffield, 4 years later becoming an area organiser for the Midlands division, based in Leicester.
In 1977 he was elected USDAW President and after losing his parliamentary seat returned to work as a national officer for USDAW with responsibilities for SATA membership and the insurance section.
Tierney was Member of Parliament for the marginal Birmingham Yardley seat from February 1974 until his defeat at 1979 general election by the Conservative David Gilroy Bevan.
He also served as a councillor and Labour NEC member and chaired the party for a year.
|}
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Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, PC (born 3 April 1925), formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British Labour Party politician, who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for fifty years, and was also a Cabinet Minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
His successful campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963. In the Labour Government of 1964–1970 he served first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as a notably "technocratic" Minister of Technology. In the period when the Labour Party was in Opposition, Benn served for a year as the Chairman of the Labour Party. In the Labour Government of 1974–1979, he returned to the Cabinet, initially serving as Secretary of State for Industry, before being made Secretary of State for Energy, retaining his post when James Callaghan replaced Wilson as Prime Minister. During the Labour Party's time in Opposition during the 1980s, he was seen as the party's prominent figure on the left, and the term "Bennite" has come to be used in Britain for someone of a more radical left-wing position.
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Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.
Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
wn.com/Tony_Blair -
Tony Lloyd
Anthony Joseph 'Tony' Lloyd (born 25 February 1950) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Manchester Central since 1997, and was the Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 2006 to 2012, when he stepped down in order to stand as the Labour candidate to be the elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester .
He went to Stretford Grammar School for Boys on Great Stone Road in Stretford and the University of Nottingham gaining a BSc in Maths in 1972. Later he went to Manchester Business School studying for an MBA, becoming a university lecturer in Business Studies at the University of Salford.
Lloyd was first elected in a political capacity when he successfully contested the 1979 Trafford Council elections, standing in Clifford ward of Old Trafford.
Following this, was first returned to the British House of Commons at the 1983 general election, as Member of Parliament for Stretford. When constituency boundaries were revised for the 1997 general election, he transferred to the Manchester Central constituency, where he has been returned at subsequent elections.
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Tracey Ullman
Tracey Ullman (born 30 December 1959) is a British stage and television actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, director, screenwriter and author.
Her early appearances were on British TV sketch comedy shows A Kick Up the Eighties (with Rik Mayall and Miriam Margolyes) and Three of a Kind (with Lenny Henry and David Copperfield). After a brief but high-profile singing career, she appeared as Candice Valentine in Girls On Top with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
She emigrated from the UK to the US and created her own network television series, The Tracey Ullman Show, from 1987 until 1990, from which The Simpsons was spun off in 1989. She later produced programmes for HBO, including Tracey Takes On... (1996–1999), for which she has won numerous awards. She has also appeared in several feature films. Ullman's most recent sketch comedy series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union, ran from 2008 to 2010 on Showtime.
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Victor Bodson
Victor Bodson (24 March 1902 – 29 June 1984) was a justice minister of Luxembourg and received the Righteous Among the Nations award by the Israeli Supreme Court for his participation during the Holocaust in helping Jews in Germany escape persecution from the German government.
Bodson was born in 1902 in Luxembourg City.
A member of the LSAP, he was a justice minister in Luxembourg. In 1967 he was appointed as Luxembourg's European Commissioner and served on the Rey Commission until 1970. He had responsibility for Transport.
Victor Bodson lived close to the river Sauer, which acts as the border between Luxemburg and Germany. Victor Bodson helped create and operate an escape route for Jews during World War II. The route required fleeing Jews to cross over the river Sauer before meeting up with Victor Bodson at his house in Steinheim. Here using a special apparatus in his car, he would ferry these people to a safe haven that had been prepared in advance by his friends. During the course of his actions, Victor Bodson risked his life several times. Due to the results of his actions approximately 100 Jews were saved from the concentration camps.
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Welsh people
The Welsh people (Welsh: Cymry) are an ethnic group and nation native to Wales and associated with the Welsh language. Welsh people historically spoke the Welsh language; however, in recent years English has predominated in most of Wales.
John Davies argues that the origin of the "Welsh nation" can be traced to the late 4th and early 5th centuries, following the Roman departure from Britain, although Brythonic Celtic languages seem to have been spoken in Wales far longer. The term Welsh people applies to people from Wales and people of Welsh ancestry perceiving themselves or being perceived as sharing a cultural heritage and shared ancestral origins. Today Wales is a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of people living in Wales are British citizens.
An analysis of the geography of Welsh surnames commissioned by the Welsh Government found that 718,000 people, or nearly 35% of the Welsh population, have a family name of Welsh origin, compared with 5.3% in the rest of the United Kingdom, 4.7% in New Zealand, 4.1% in Australia, and 3.8% in the United States, with an estimated 16.3 million people in the countries studied having Welsh ancestry.
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Wikipedia Persondata
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Will Self
William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English journalist, novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time. He has also appeared on the comedy panel show Have I Got News for You, though he has since declared that he will not make any further appearances on the show.
Self was raised, in his words, in "an effortlessly dull" North London suburb (East Finchley, although he sometimes lays claim to Hampstead Garden Suburb) by "intellectually snobbish parents". His father was Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics and Professor of Urban Research at the Australian National University, and his mother a Jewish American immigrant who worked as a publisher's assistant. Through his father, Self is a descendant of minister Nathaniel Woodard. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, Self was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs in his teenage years. His parents separated when he was 9, and divorced when he was 18.
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William Adamson
William Adamson (2 April 1863 – 23 February 1936) was a Scottish trade unionist and Labour politician. He was Leader of the Labour Party between 1917 and 1921 and served as Secretary of State for Scotland in 1924 and between 1929 and 1931 in the first two Labour administrations headed by Ramsay MacDonald.
Adamson was born in Dunfermline, Fife, and was educated at a local dame school. He worked as a miner in Fife where he became involved with the National Union of Mineworkers. Between 1902 and 1908 he was Assistant Secretary of the Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan Miners' Association.
Active with the new Labour Party, Adamson was first elected to Parliament for West Fife in the December 1910 general election and became leader of the party in 1917, a position he held until 1921. In 1918 he was sworn of the Privy Council. He served as Secretary for Scotland and Secretary of State for Scotland in 1924 and between 1929 and 1931 in the Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald.
However, he split with MacDonald after the formation of the National Government. Adamson lost his seat in the 1931 election which he contested for Labour against MacDonald's coalition. He stood again in the 1935 election but again failed to take the seat, losing on this occasion to William Gallacher of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[citation needed]
wn.com/William_Adamson
Kinnock, Neil Filmography
- Newsnight at 30 (2010)
- Miliband of Brothers (2010)
- Election 2010 (2010)
- John Mortimer: A Life in Words (2009)
- Best Ever Spitting Image (2006)
- Singing from the Heart: The Story of Treorchy Male Choir (2005)
- Where Words Prevail (2005)
- Kilroy: Behind the Tan (2005)
- Have I Got News for You: The Best of the Guest Presenters - Volume 2 (2005)
- The British Comedy Awards 2004 (2004)
- Grumpy Old Men (2003)
- Strike: When Britain Went to War (2003)
- The Deal (2003)
- The Very Best of 'Have I Got News for You' (2002)
- There's Only One Paul McCartney (2002)
- Vote 2001 (2001)
- Election 97 (1997)
- Election 92 (1992)
- Amnesty International's Big 30 (1991)
- November Days (1991)
- Election 1987 (1987)
- Labour Party Election Broadcast (21 May 1987) (1987)
- Election 83 (1983)
- Above Us the Earth (1977)
- World in Action (1963)
Famous quotes by Neil Kinnock:
"Mr Blair made the decision before the election that it would be his last as leader,"
"I've been so bloody respectable and responsible... I'm going to be a bloody old nuisance."
"I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old."
"I?m not even sure I?d go into a reformed House of Lords. But let?s put it like this, the decision would have been easier had there been not even complete reform but a substantial stride."
"Do something that makes a difference - because, by God, there's a lot to make you angry."
"I would die for my country but I could never let my country die for me"
"The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing."
"Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards."
"You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits."
"The enemy of idealism is zealotry."
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Neil Kinnock - 'That Speech'
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:48
- Updated: 14 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_'That_Speech'
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985.
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock reacts on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:24
- Updated: 04 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount of seats for an outright majority for government, meaning Labour will not be in government - again. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
http://wn.com/1987GenElec_Neil_Kinnock_reacts_on_Labour_losing_election_09Jun12
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount of seats for an outright majority for government, meaning Labour will not be in government - again. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
- published: 10 Jun 2012
- views: 816
- author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock goes berserk
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:28
- Updated: 16 Feb 2013
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him of having no aspirations.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_goes_berserk
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him of having no aspirations.
- published: 28 Apr 2010
- views: 11686
- author: nightprowler75
Conversations with History - Neil Kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 28:04
- Updated: 02 Sep 2012
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the Labor Party of Great Britain Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labor Party and Member of Parliament in Great Britain. In this 1994 interview, Kinnock discusses his choice of a political career, the nature of politics, the difference between theory and practice, and the choices confronting parties of the left in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Recorded March 9, l994. globetrotter.berkeley.edu globetrotter.berkeley.edu conversationswithhistory.typepad.com www.thenewpress.com
http://wn.com/Conversations_with_History_Neil_Kinnock
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the Labor Party of Great Britain Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labor Party and Member of Parliament in Great Britain. In this 1994 interview, Kinnock discusses his choice of a political career, the nature of politics, the difference between theory and practice, and the choices confronting parties of the left in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Recorded March 9, l994. globetrotter.berkeley.edu globetrotter.berkeley.edu conversationswithhistory.typepad.com www.thenewpress.com
- published: 12 Mar 2010
- views: 3058
- author: UCBerkeleyEvents
UK General Election 1992 - Neil "We're Alright" Kinnock at the 1992 Sheffield Rally
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:11
- Updated: 31 Jan 2013
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?
http://wn.com/UK_General_Election_1992_Neil_We're_Alright_Kinnock_at_the_1992_Sheffield_Rally
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?
- published: 30 Oct 2009
- views: 51616
- author: MrElectionist
Neil Kinnock Vs Paul Boateng on AV referendum (01May11)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:12
- Updated: 31 Aug 2012
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / no positions on the Alternate Vote referendum. Recorded from Sky News, 01 May 2011.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Vs_Paul_Boateng_on_AV_referendum_01May11
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / no positions on the Alternate Vote referendum. Recorded from Sky News, 01 May 2011.
- published: 01 May 2011
- views: 809
- author: liarpoliticians
Election Call: Neil Kinnock 070492
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 52:36
- Updated: 20 Dec 2012
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleby Producer: Nick Utechin
http://wn.com/Election_Call_Neil_Kinnock_070492
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleby Producer: Nick Utechin
- published: 29 Aug 2012
- views: 55
- author: jbj712
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:42
- Updated: 16 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in Manchester. For more information visit www.labour.org.uk
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_pays_tribute_to_Michael_Foot_at_the_Labour_Party_Conference_2010
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in Manchester. For more information visit www.labour.org.uk
- published: 26 Sep 2010
- views: 4957
- author: theuklabourparty
thatcher vs kinnock on ambulance workers
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:32
- Updated: 17 Feb 2013
kinnock once again shows his true nature.
http://wn.com/thatcher_vs_kinnock_on_ambulance_workers
kinnock once again shows his true nature.
- published: 16 Sep 2012
- views: 1215
- author: thatcheritescot
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:48
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_giving_his_Election_speech_about_life_under_Thatcher
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
- published: 08 Dec 2010
- views: 8624
- author: iconic
Margaret Thatcher VS Roy Hattersley.wmv
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:32
- Updated: 10 Feb 2013
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs
http://wn.com/Margaret_Thatcher_VS_Roy_Hattersleywmv
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs
- published: 31 Jan 2012
- views: 12699
- author: thatcheritescot
margaret thatcher on neil kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:05
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
maggie tells us about neil kinnock
http://wn.com/margaret_thatcher_on_neil_kinnock
strident neil kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:25
- Updated: 07 Feb 2013
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense
http://wn.com/strident_neil_kinnock
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense
- published: 29 Aug 2010
- views: 17022
- author: thatcheritescot
The Anthony Clare Interviews - Neil Kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 42:03
- Updated: 13 Jul 2012
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role in politics, as well as being a European Union commissioner.
http://wn.com/The_Anthony_Clare_Interviews_Neil_Kinnock
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role in politics, as well as being a European Union commissioner.
- published: 11 Aug 2010
- views: 933
- author: STVPeople
Duran Duran win Best Video presented by Neil Kinnock | BRIT Awards 1985
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:34
- Updated: 22 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock presented the BRIT Award for Best British Video to Duran Duran at The BRIT Awards 1985
http://wn.com/Duran_Duran_win_Best_Video_presented_by_Neil_Kinnock_|_BRIT_Awards_1985
Neil Kinnock presented the BRIT Award for Best British Video to Duran Duran at The BRIT Awards 1985
- published: 07 Dec 2012
- views: 425
- author: thebritawards
Neil Kinnock Coming Home to Tredegar
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:33
- Updated: 24 Aug 2012
Inc film of "Trev the Milk". Please visit www.Tredegar.co.uk for more info on the great town of Tredegar, South Wales.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Coming_Home_to_Tredegar
Inc film of "Trev the Milk". Please visit www.Tredegar.co.uk for more info on the great town of Tredegar, South Wales.
- published: 24 Aug 2012
- views: 210
- author: Tredegarfilm
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock recreminations on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:23
- Updated: 10 Jun 2012
Neil Kinnock has his recriminations on Labour losing the 1987 General Election. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
http://wn.com/1987GenElec_Neil_Kinnock_recreminations_on_Labour_losing_election_09Jun12
Neil Kinnock has his recriminations on Labour losing the 1987 General Election. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
- published: 10 Jun 2012
- views: 223
- author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock has his say on the PES manifesto
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:11
- Updated: 27 Aug 2010
Former Labour Party UK Leader Neil Kinnock gives his input to the PES manifesto for the European elections
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_has_his_say_on_the_PES_manifesto
Former Labour Party UK Leader Neil Kinnock gives his input to the PES manifesto for the European elections
- published: 21 Apr 2008
- views: 1706
- author: europeansocialists
thatcher vs kinnock on unemployment
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:18
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
from 1990
http://wn.com/thatcher_vs_kinnock_on_unemployment
Neil Kinnock wants newspaper censorship / regulation (19July11)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:50
- Updated: 24 Jul 2011
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, the same way it is regulated for television. But what about the BBC, they are NOT independent, they are a Labour mouthpiece, and no regulation has ever stopped that. Recorded from BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2011. Additional graphic added to make the video work on youtube.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_wants_newspaper_censorship_regulation_19July11
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, the same way it is regulated for television. But what about the BBC, they are NOT independent, they are a Labour mouthpiece, and no regulation has ever stopped that. Recorded from BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2011. Additional graphic added to make the video work on youtube.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 353
- author: liarpoliticians
MARGARET THATCHER - Pt 5 Taking on the Unions (Telegraph Documentary)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 28:13
- Updated: 23 Feb 2013
An 8 part documentary series on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, issued by The Daily Telegraph in 2008, never released commerically. Narrated by the late Anna Massey. Part five about Margaret Thatcher's way of tackling the powerful unions features interviews with Lord Peter Walker, Sir Bernard Ingram, Michael Dobbs, Lord Neil Kinnock and Charles Moore.
http://wn.com/MARGARET_THATCHER_Pt_5_Taking_on_the_Unions_Telegraph_Documentary
An 8 part documentary series on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, issued by The Daily Telegraph in 2008, never released commerically. Narrated by the late Anna Massey. Part five about Margaret Thatcher's way of tackling the powerful unions features interviews with Lord Peter Walker, Sir Bernard Ingram, Michael Dobbs, Lord Neil Kinnock and Charles Moore.
- published: 08 Nov 2012
- views: 1909
- author: MrDima999
Neil Kinnock Speech at Bournemouth Conferennce 1985 about grotesque chaos
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:34
- Updated: 13 Sep 2012
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ahead of how politicians orate now in modern Britain. This is his trouncing of militant Labour, given in the Bournemouth party conference in 1985. I love the part where he talks about grotesque chaos. I heard it on the news that day and I still remember it. Hearing this again is to think of how politics used to be... engaging, exciting, aspirational, alive.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Speech_at_Bournemouth_Conferennce_1985_about_grotesque_chaos
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ahead of how politicians orate now in modern Britain. This is his trouncing of militant Labour, given in the Bournemouth party conference in 1985. I love the part where he talks about grotesque chaos. I heard it on the news that day and I still remember it. Hearing this again is to think of how politics used to be... engaging, exciting, aspirational, alive.
- published: 24 Jan 2010
- views: 14495
- author: sponty3
Neil Kinnock, falling endlessly into the sea
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:19
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
A tone poem based on the biblical fall of Neil Kinnock
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock,_falling_endlessly_into_the_sea
A tone poem based on the biblical fall of Neil Kinnock
- published: 21 Jun 2011
- views: 5169
- author: themanwhofellasleep
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Conversations with History - Neil Kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 28:04
- Updated: 02 Sep 2012
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the Labor Party of Great Britain Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labor Party and Member of Parliament in Great Britain. In this 1994 interview, Kinnock discusses his choice of a political career, the nature of politics, the difference between theory and practice, and the choices confronting parties of the left in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Recorded March 9, l994. globetrotter.berkeley.edu globetrotter.berkeley.edu conversationswithhistory.typepad.com www.thenewpress.com
http://wn.com/Conversations_with_History_Neil_Kinnock
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the Labor Party of Great Britain Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labor Party and Member of Parliament in Great Britain. In this 1994 interview, Kinnock discusses his choice of a political career, the nature of politics, the difference between theory and practice, and the choices confronting parties of the left in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Recorded March 9, l994. globetrotter.berkeley.edu globetrotter.berkeley.edu conversationswithhistory.typepad.com www.thenewpress.com
- published: 12 Mar 2010
- views: 3058
- author: UCBerkeleyEvents
Neil Kinnock - 'That Speech'
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:48
- Updated: 14 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_'That_Speech'
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985.
- published: 13 Jun 2010
- views: 52081
- author: noname1209
The Anthony Clare Interviews - Neil Kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 42:03
- Updated: 13 Jul 2012
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role in politics, as well as being a European Union commissioner.
http://wn.com/The_Anthony_Clare_Interviews_Neil_Kinnock
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role in politics, as well as being a European Union commissioner.
- published: 11 Aug 2010
- views: 933
- author: STVPeople
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock reacts on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:24
- Updated: 04 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount of seats for an outright majority for government, meaning Labour will not be in government - again. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
http://wn.com/1987GenElec_Neil_Kinnock_reacts_on_Labour_losing_election_09Jun12
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount of seats for an outright majority for government, meaning Labour will not be in government - again. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
- published: 10 Jun 2012
- views: 816
- author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock goes berserk
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:28
- Updated: 16 Feb 2013
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him of having no aspirations.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_goes_berserk
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him of having no aspirations.
- published: 28 Apr 2010
- views: 11686
- author: nightprowler75
Welsh Windbag Kinnock interviewed (19Dec10)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:22
- Updated: 26 Feb 2012
Labour's Welsh Windbag Neil Kinnock is interviewed. Recorded from BBC's Andrew Marr Show, 19 December 2010.
http://wn.com/Welsh_Windbag_Kinnock_interviewed_19Dec10
Labour's Welsh Windbag Neil Kinnock is interviewed. Recorded from BBC's Andrew Marr Show, 19 December 2010.
- published: 19 Dec 2010
- views: 617
- author: liarpoliticians
UK General Election 1992 - Neil "We're Alright" Kinnock at the 1992 Sheffield Rally
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:11
- Updated: 31 Jan 2013
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?
http://wn.com/UK_General_Election_1992_Neil_We're_Alright_Kinnock_at_the_1992_Sheffield_Rally
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?
- published: 30 Oct 2009
- views: 51616
- author: MrElectionist
Neil Kinnock Vs Paul Boateng on AV referendum (01May11)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:12
- Updated: 31 Aug 2012
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / no positions on the Alternate Vote referendum. Recorded from Sky News, 01 May 2011.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Vs_Paul_Boateng_on_AV_referendum_01May11
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / no positions on the Alternate Vote referendum. Recorded from Sky News, 01 May 2011.
- published: 01 May 2011
- views: 809
- author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:42
- Updated: 16 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in Manchester. For more information visit www.labour.org.uk
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_pays_tribute_to_Michael_Foot_at_the_Labour_Party_Conference_2010
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in Manchester. For more information visit www.labour.org.uk
- published: 26 Sep 2010
- views: 4957
- author: theuklabourparty
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:48
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_giving_his_Election_speech_about_life_under_Thatcher
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
- published: 08 Dec 2010
- views: 8624
- author: iconic
Election Call: Neil Kinnock 070492
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 52:36
- Updated: 20 Dec 2012
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleby Producer: Nick Utechin
http://wn.com/Election_Call_Neil_Kinnock_070492
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleby Producer: Nick Utechin
- published: 29 Aug 2012
- views: 55
- author: jbj712
Margaret Thatcher VS Roy Hattersley.wmv
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:32
- Updated: 10 Feb 2013
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs
http://wn.com/Margaret_Thatcher_VS_Roy_Hattersleywmv
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs
- published: 31 Jan 2012
- views: 12699
- author: thatcheritescot
margaret thatcher on neil kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:05
- Updated: 24 Feb 2013
maggie tells us about neil kinnock
http://wn.com/margaret_thatcher_on_neil_kinnock
strident neil kinnock
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:25
- Updated: 07 Feb 2013
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense
http://wn.com/strident_neil_kinnock
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense
- published: 29 Aug 2010
- views: 17022
- author: thatcheritescot
thatcher vs kinnock on ambulance workers
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:32
- Updated: 17 Feb 2013
kinnock once again shows his true nature.
http://wn.com/thatcher_vs_kinnock_on_ambulance_workers
kinnock once again shows his true nature.
- published: 16 Sep 2012
- views: 1215
- author: thatcheritescot
Neil Kinnock wants newspaper censorship / regulation (19July11)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:50
- Updated: 24 Jul 2011
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, the same way it is regulated for television. But what about the BBC, they are NOT independent, they are a Labour mouthpiece, and no regulation has ever stopped that. Recorded from BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2011. Additional graphic added to make the video work on youtube.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_wants_newspaper_censorship_regulation_19July11
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, the same way it is regulated for television. But what about the BBC, they are NOT independent, they are a Labour mouthpiece, and no regulation has ever stopped that. Recorded from BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2011. Additional graphic added to make the video work on youtube.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 353
- author: liarpoliticians
@killdozer interviews Neil Kinnock Sunday 26th September 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:43
- Updated: 20 Jul 2011
Andrew Walker - @killdozer - interviews Neil Kinnock at the Labour Conference in Manchester, Sunday 26th September 2010. They discuss Labour's new direction, Ed Miliband's election as leader and Michael Foot's legacy.
http://wn.com/@killdozer_interviews_Neil_Kinnock_Sunday_26th_September_2010
Andrew Walker - @killdozer - interviews Neil Kinnock at the Labour Conference in Manchester, Sunday 26th September 2010. They discuss Labour's new direction, Ed Miliband's election as leader and Michael Foot's legacy.
- published: 29 Sep 2010
- views: 110
- author: g1tfinger
Neil Kinnock Speech at Bournemouth Conferennce 1985 about grotesque chaos
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:34
- Updated: 13 Sep 2012
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ahead of how politicians orate now in modern Britain. This is his trouncing of militant Labour, given in the Bournemouth party conference in 1985. I love the part where he talks about grotesque chaos. I heard it on the news that day and I still remember it. Hearing this again is to think of how politics used to be... engaging, exciting, aspirational, alive.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Speech_at_Bournemouth_Conferennce_1985_about_grotesque_chaos
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ahead of how politicians orate now in modern Britain. This is his trouncing of militant Labour, given in the Bournemouth party conference in 1985. I love the part where he talks about grotesque chaos. I heard it on the news that day and I still remember it. Hearing this again is to think of how politics used to be... engaging, exciting, aspirational, alive.
- published: 24 Jan 2010
- views: 14495
- author: sponty3
margaret thatcher vs neil kinnock at pmqs part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:55
- Updated: 17 Feb 2013
maggie takes pmqs
http://wn.com/margaret_thatcher_vs_neil_kinnock_at_pmqs_part_1
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock recreminations on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:23
- Updated: 10 Jun 2012
Neil Kinnock has his recriminations on Labour losing the 1987 General Election. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
http://wn.com/1987GenElec_Neil_Kinnock_recreminations_on_Labour_losing_election_09Jun12
Neil Kinnock has his recriminations on Labour losing the 1987 General Election. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
- published: 10 Jun 2012
- views: 223
- author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock Coming Home to Tredegar
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:33
- Updated: 24 Aug 2012
Inc film of "Trev the Milk". Please visit www.Tredegar.co.uk for more info on the great town of Tredegar, South Wales.
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_Coming_Home_to_Tredegar
Inc film of "Trev the Milk". Please visit www.Tredegar.co.uk for more info on the great town of Tredegar, South Wales.
- published: 24 Aug 2012
- views: 210
- author: Tredegarfilm
Neil Kinnock has his say on the PES manifesto
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:11
- Updated: 27 Aug 2010
Former Labour Party UK Leader Neil Kinnock gives his input to the PES manifesto for the European elections
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock_has_his_say_on_the_PES_manifesto
Former Labour Party UK Leader Neil Kinnock gives his input to the PES manifesto for the European elections
- published: 21 Apr 2008
- views: 1706
- author: europeansocialists
Neil Kinnock, falling endlessly into the sea
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:19
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
A tone poem based on the biblical fall of Neil Kinnock
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock,_falling_endlessly_into_the_sea
A tone poem based on the biblical fall of Neil Kinnock
- published: 21 Jun 2011
- views: 5169
- author: themanwhofellasleep
28:04
Conversations with History - Neil Kinnock
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the ...
published: 12 Mar 2010
author: UCBerkeleyEvents
Conversations with History - Neil Kinnock
"The Work of Politics" Neil Kinnock, former Member of Parliament and former Leader of the Labor Party of Great Britain Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labor Party and Member of Parliament in Great Britain. In this 1994 interview, Kinnock discusses his choice of a political career, the nature of politics, the difference between theory and practice, and the choices confronting parties of the left in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Recorded March 9, l994. globetrotter.berkeley.edu globetrotter.berkeley.edu conversationswithhistory.typepad.com www.thenewpress.com
- published: 12 Mar 2010
- views: 3058
- author: UCBerkeleyEvents
2:48
Neil Kinnock - 'That Speech'
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985....
published: 13 Jun 2010
author: noname1209
Neil Kinnock - 'That Speech'
Neil Kinnock's famous speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton, October 1985.
- published: 13 Jun 2010
- views: 52081
- author: noname1209
42:03
The Anthony Clare Interviews - Neil Kinnock
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role...
published: 11 Aug 2010
author: STVPeople
The Anthony Clare Interviews - Neil Kinnock
This week Anthony interviews one time Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and talks about his role in politics, as well as being a European Union commissioner.
- published: 11 Aug 2010
- views: 933
- author: STVPeople
10:24
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock reacts on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount...
published: 10 Jun 2012
author: liarpoliticians
1987GenElec: Neil Kinnock reacts on Labour losing election (09Jun12)
Neil Kinnock gives his instant reaction to the news that the Conservatives have the amount of seats for an outright majority for government, meaning Labour will not be in government - again. General Election held on 11 June 1987. Recorded from BBC Parliament, 09 June 2012.
- published: 10 Jun 2012
- views: 816
- author: liarpoliticians
3:28
Neil Kinnock goes berserk
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him...
published: 28 Apr 2010
author: nightprowler75
Neil Kinnock goes berserk
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock goes on a rant after thinking Nicky Campbell accuses him of having no aspirations.
- published: 28 Apr 2010
- views: 11686
- author: nightprowler75
6:22
Welsh Windbag Kinnock interviewed (19Dec10)
Labour's Welsh Windbag Neil Kinnock is interviewed. Recorded from BBC's Andrew Marr Show, ...
published: 19 Dec 2010
author: liarpoliticians
Welsh Windbag Kinnock interviewed (19Dec10)
Labour's Welsh Windbag Neil Kinnock is interviewed. Recorded from BBC's Andrew Marr Show, 19 December 2010.
- published: 19 Dec 2010
- views: 617
- author: liarpoliticians
3:11
UK General Election 1992 - Neil "We're Alright" Kinnock at the 1992 Sheffield Rally
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?...
published: 30 Oct 2009
author: MrElectionist
UK General Election 1992 - Neil "We're Alright" Kinnock at the 1992 Sheffield Rally
That infamous speech. Did the percieved over-confidence cost them the election?
- published: 30 Oct 2009
- views: 51616
- author: MrElectionist
11:12
Neil Kinnock Vs Paul Boateng on AV referendum (01May11)
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / n...
published: 01 May 2011
author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock Vs Paul Boateng on AV referendum (01May11)
Welsh Windbag and EUSSR nut Neil Kinnock argues with Paul Boateng their respective yes / no positions on the Alternate Vote referendum. Recorded from Sky News, 01 May 2011.
- published: 01 May 2011
- views: 809
- author: liarpoliticians
11:42
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in ...
published: 26 Sep 2010
author: theuklabourparty
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010
Neil Kinnock pays tribute to the late Michael Foot at the Labour Party Conference 2010 in Manchester. For more information visit www.labour.org.uk
- published: 26 Sep 2010
- views: 4957
- author: theuklabourparty
0:48
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher...
published: 08 Dec 2010
author: iconic
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
Neil Kinnock giving his Election speech about life under Thatcher
- published: 08 Dec 2010
- views: 8624
- author: iconic
52:36
Election Call: Neil Kinnock 070492
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleb...
published: 29 Aug 2012
author: jbj712
Election Call: Neil Kinnock 070492
Election Call: Neil Kinnock BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 7 April 1992 Presenter: Jonathan Dimbleby Producer: Nick Utechin
- published: 29 Aug 2012
- views: 55
- author: jbj712
3:32
Margaret Thatcher VS Roy Hattersley.wmv
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs...
published: 31 Jan 2012
author: thatcheritescot
Margaret Thatcher VS Roy Hattersley.wmv
roy hattersley fills in for neil kinnock at pmqs
- published: 31 Jan 2012
- views: 12699
- author: thatcheritescot
2:05
margaret thatcher on neil kinnock
maggie tells us about neil kinnock...
published: 19 Aug 2009
author: thatcheritescot
margaret thatcher on neil kinnock
maggie tells us about neil kinnock
- published: 19 Aug 2009
- views: 20751
- author: thatcheritescot
1:25
strident neil kinnock
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense...
published: 29 Aug 2010
author: thatcheritescot
strident neil kinnock
maggie having some fun at kinnocks expense
- published: 29 Aug 2010
- views: 17022
- author: thatcheritescot
Vimeo results:
2:58
An interview with Lord Neil Kinnock
The Inauguration of Professor Sir Martin Evans as the 22nd President of Cardiff University...
published: 09 Dec 2010
author: Cardiff University
An interview with Lord Neil Kinnock
The Inauguration of Professor Sir Martin Evans as the 22nd President of Cardiff University took place at a special ceremony (23 November), which also recognised the outstanding contribution of Lord Neil Kinnock as president (1998-2009).
0:21
motorcycle display team - lbc radio
title: motorcycle display team
client: lbc
director: neil coxhill
producer: rachel kinnock...
published: 12 Apr 2012
author: neil coxhill
motorcycle display team - lbc radio
title: motorcycle display team
client: lbc
director: neil coxhill
producer: rachel kinnock & cindy burnay
production company: r.s.a
dop: joe dyer
editor: rachael spam
agency: vccp
creatives: peter and paul
5:17
Protect Darfur: UNHCR and Aegis Trust
Government ministers discuss the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region and lead praise for the w...
published: 07 Nov 2008
author: Aegis Trust
Protect Darfur: UNHCR and Aegis Trust
Government ministers discuss the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region and lead praise for the work of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and Aegis Trust in responding to it. They were speaking at the Labour Party's 2008 Annual Conference in Manchester where the two agencies had erected a mock burnt Darfur village as part of an effort to portray the violence that has uprooted more than 2.5 million Darfuris and forced some 250,000 refugees into UNHCR's 12 camps across the border in eastern Chad.
Those interviewed in the film include David Miliband, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett, Douglas Alexander, Neil Kinnock, Glenys Kinnock, Jim Murphy, Peter Hain, Gillian Merron, Shahid Malik, Mary Creagh, Mike Gapes and Jon Snow.
8:49
Where Words Prevail (Excerpt, 2005)
Where Words Prevail explores the widely acclaimed work of Cicely Berry, Voice Director of ...
published: 10 Jun 2010
author: Sojourner Media
Where Words Prevail (Excerpt, 2005)
Where Words Prevail explores the widely acclaimed work of Cicely Berry, Voice Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Her voice techniques are invaluable to actors and directors who are performing classical plays in today’s theater. From rehearsals at the RSC in Stratford-on-Avon, to workshops and Master Classes in Seoul, New York, Moscow and the slums of Rio de Janeiro, her work is documented in diverse languages, producing new understanding in the power of voice, language and communications. Her influence has extended into other areas as well, including film and politics. Having coached prominent politicians on effective public speaking, Berry asserts that the political sound byte is now “destroying democratic debate.”
Now more than ever, Berry’s vision for exciting people with language is antidotal to the deterioration of voice, language and communication, which is becoming increasingly prevalent the world over.
The program runs 57 minutes. Participants in the film include Adrian Noble, Andrew Wade, Edward Bond, Emily Watson, Greg Hicks, Helen Hunt, Jatinda Verma, Michael Attenborough, Neil Kinnock, Sam West, Steven Pimlott and Zoe Waites. Sponsored by WGBH, nationally aired on PBS.
Youtube results:
2:32
thatcher vs kinnock on ambulance workers
kinnock once again shows his true nature....
published: 16 Sep 2012
author: thatcheritescot
thatcher vs kinnock on ambulance workers
kinnock once again shows his true nature.
- published: 16 Sep 2012
- views: 1215
- author: thatcheritescot
13:50
Neil Kinnock wants newspaper censorship / regulation (19July11)
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, t...
published: 19 Jul 2011
author: liarpoliticians
Neil Kinnock wants newspaper censorship / regulation (19July11)
Full Neil Kinnock interview of him saying that he wants censorship of the printed press, the same way it is regulated for television. But what about the BBC, they are NOT independent, they are a Labour mouthpiece, and no regulation has ever stopped that. Recorded from BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2011. Additional graphic added to make the video work on youtube.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 353
- author: liarpoliticians
1:43
@killdozer interviews Neil Kinnock Sunday 26th September 2010
Andrew Walker - @killdozer - interviews Neil Kinnock at the Labour Conference in Mancheste...
published: 29 Sep 2010
author: g1tfinger
@killdozer interviews Neil Kinnock Sunday 26th September 2010
Andrew Walker - @killdozer - interviews Neil Kinnock at the Labour Conference in Manchester, Sunday 26th September 2010. They discuss Labour's new direction, Ed Miliband's election as leader and Michael Foot's legacy.
- published: 29 Sep 2010
- views: 110
- author: g1tfinger
0:34
Neil Kinnock Speech at Bournemouth Conferennce 1985 about grotesque chaos
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ah...
published: 24 Jan 2010
author: sponty3
Neil Kinnock Speech at Bournemouth Conferennce 1985 about grotesque chaos
You may not agree with everything Neil Kinnock said but he was a great speaker, leagues ahead of how politicians orate now in modern Britain. This is his trouncing of militant Labour, given in the Bournemouth party conference in 1985. I love the part where he talks about grotesque chaos. I heard it on the news that day and I still remember it. Hearing this again is to think of how politics used to be... engaging, exciting, aspirational, alive.
- published: 24 Jan 2010
- views: 14495
- author: sponty3
photo: Public Domain
23 Feb 2013
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. "No one who works full-time should have to live in poverty." -President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, 2013. As of late, I have grown very fond and reflective of the workers at McDonalds. Since I do not have the internet in my apartment, I usually go there every Sunday where I drink coffee and read the latest online news ... the exploitation of one class by another....(size: 3.7Kb)
photo: AP / SANA
22 Feb 2013
MOSCOW ' Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the United States on Friday of having double standards on Syria, saying it had blocked a UN Security Council statement condemning a car bomb attack in Damascus. Washington denied it had blocked the statement and said it had only asked for balance ... “We believe these are double standards,” Lavrov said after talks with China’s foreign minister ... ....(size: 3.0Kb)
photo: UN / Sylvain Liechti
24 Feb 2013
Presidents from Africa's Great Lakes regional nations are set to sign a new peace deal aimed at bringing stability to the war-torn east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, who will witness the signing on Sunday at the African Union's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has invited 11 countries to the meeting ... But after almost two decades of war, expectations are low ... ....(size: 7.7Kb)
photo: AP / Photo
22 Feb 2013
MALINDI, Kenya — In a room by the stairs, Shukrani Malingi, a Pokomo farmer, writhed on a metal cot, the skin on his back burned off. Down the hall, at a safe distance, Rahema Hageyo, an Orma girl, stared blankly out of a window, a long scar above her thimble-like neck. She was nearly decapitated by a machete chop — and she is only 9 months old. Connect With Us on Twitter ... Twitter List. Reporters and Editors ... ... Op-Ed ... N.Y ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
The Guardian
25 Feb 2013
Highly effective Scottish secretary and European commissioner. Bruce Millan in 1977; he was credited with establishing the Scottish Development Agency as a powerful, well-funded organisation. Photograph. PA ... Millan was born in Dundee ... Millan soldiered loyally on in opposition and his selection by Neil Kinnock as Labour's nominee for the highly prized commissioner's post in Brussels came as a considerable surprise ... ....(size: 5.2Kb)
The Hindu
19 Feb 2013
In the town centre of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria (north-west England), between McDonald’s and Carphone Warehouse, there is an unusual statue ... No job losses ... Accompanying Mr ... “Labour will limit Britain’s arms sales abroad.” Under the leadership of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the party planned to reduce British manufacturing’s dependency on defence by converting the factories involved to civilian use ... Mr....(size: 21.2Kb)
Bloomberg
18 Feb 2013
Ed Miliband, leader of the U.K. opposition Labour Party, will visit Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands this week, seeking to demonstrate engagement with the European Union following Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent confrontations ... Thorning-Schmidt is the daughter-in-law of a previous Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock, who led the party from 1983 to 1992, was defeated at two elections ... 20 ... To contact the reporter on this story ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)
The Daily Telegraph
18 Feb 2013
Left-wing leaders must unite across Europe to reject “collective austerity”, Ed Miliband has declared as he embarked on a tour of the region. Labour's next election campaign has effectively begun Photo. REUTERS/Phil Noble. By Tim Ross, Political Correspondent ... Comments ... Ms Thorning-Schmidt is the daughter-in-law of a previous Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who led the party from 1983 to 1992 and lost two general elections ... ....(size: 7.4Kb)
Bloomberg
17 Feb 2013
Ed Miliband, leader of the U.K. opposition Labour party, will visit Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands this week, seeking to demonstrate engagement with the European Union following Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent confrontations ... Thorning-Schmidt is the daughter-in-law of a previous Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Kinnock, who led the party from 1983 to 1992, was defeated at two elections ... 20 ... To contact the reporter on this story ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)
The Observer
17 Feb 2013
John O'Farrell will be standing for Labour in the Eastleigh byelection. Photograph. Martin Godwin ... But hold on. Pollsters tell us that the public believes Labour caused much of the mess and the Tories are "clearing up" ... Neil Kinnock's pre-election victory conference in Sheffield helped floating voters fear the Sun's headline . "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights." ... "One Nation ... "One Nation....(size: 8.4Kb)
The Independent
17 Feb 2013
The fabled Scouse humour survived, of course. It always does ... Not just the mortal tragedies of Hillsborough, and Heysel, but also the social tragedy of Militant, the powerful Trotskyite faction on the city council, who presided over what Neil Kinnock famously called the "grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council! – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers"....(size: 4.8Kb)
The Guardian
14 Feb 2013
When Wilson was elected Labour leader 50 years ago, many MPs thought him a politician without principle. Now it's possible to see things differently. 27 Feb 1963, London, England, UK --- Original caption. London, England ... At the shadow cabinet's dinner, which marked the end of Neil Kinnock's leadership and my nine years as deputy, Gerald Kaufman, once Wilson's press secretary, included in his eulogy an explanation of what went wrong ... ....(size: 9.9Kb)
The Guardian
13 Feb 2013
The Brits are coming! We're marking the annual bunfest by reliving Neil ... Anyway, then David Grant starts talking to Nick and I wander through the bar, past Neil Kinnock who's here with his wife, Glenys, and two kids, and nearly bump into Alison Moyet arriving with her husband ... Right beside her, Neil Kinnock is being questioned by journalists....(size: 6.7Kb)
BBC News
10 Feb 2013
The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has warned that David Cameron's stance on an EU referendum poses a risk to the UK. Lord Kinnock said the Prime Minister was "rolling the dice" and ......(size: 1.0Kb)
The Guardian
10 Feb 2013
The Bank of England is trying to summon growth. But unless there is a change in fiscal policy, will it come? ... Photograph. Michael Buholzer/Reuters. David Cameron's problem is that, although he regards himself as the "heir to Blair", he did not have someone of the political courage and clout of Neil Kinnock to detoxify his party before he took over ... At a time like this, it is very important not to pay down the debt ... ....(size: 6.8Kb)
The Observer
10 Feb 2013
Photograph. Rex Features ... Griffith laughed at the idea, but not for the first time Fitzgerald was proved right ... Though at times he seems more like an overweight, middle-aged Neil Kinnock than the East End director, Hopkins captures the sad, insecure Hitch beneath the posed public persona that's half Dickens's Fat Boy "who wants to make your flesh creep" and half the urbane sophisticate who has the Times flown in from London daily ... Share....(size: 8.7Kb)
BBC News
05 Feb 2013
Chris Huhne is officially no longer an MP, a day after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice ... This means that Mr Huhne is prohibited from sitting in the Commons ... Continue reading the main story “Start Quote ... They talk of comebacks. Maybe ... Others who have resigned as an MP by being appointed to the Chiltern Hundreds include Roy Jenkins, Brian Walden, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, David Davis, and Eric Illsley. ....(size: 2.2Kb)
| The Right Honourable The Lord Kinnock PC |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Leader of the Opposition | |
| In office 2 October 1983 – 18 July 1992 |
|
| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Prime Minister | Margaret Thatcher John Major |
| Preceded by | Michael Foot |
| Succeeded by | John Smith |
| Leader of the Labour Party | |
| In office 2 October 1983 – 18 July 1992 |
|
| Deputy | Roy Hattersley |
| Preceded by | Michael Foot |
| Succeeded by | John Smith |
| Vice-President of the European Commission | |
| In office 16 September 1999 – 21 November 2004 |
|
| President | Romano Prodi |
| Preceded by | Leon Brittan |
| Succeeded by | Günter Verheugen |
| European Commissioner for Administrative Reform | |
| In office 16 September 1999 – 21 November 2004 |
|
| Preceded by | Erkki Liikanen |
| Succeeded by | Siim Kallas |
| European Commissioner for Transport | |
| In office 16 February 1995 – 16 September 1999 |
|
| Preceded by | Karel Van Miert |
| Succeeded by | Loyola de Palacio |
| Shadow Education Secretary | |
| In office 4 May 1979 – 2 October 1983 |
|
| Leader | James Callaghan Michael Foot |
| Preceded by | Mark Carlisle |
| Succeeded by | John Smith |
| Member of Parliament for Islwyn |
|
| In office 9 June 1983 – 16 February 1995 |
|
| Preceded by | Constituency Established |
| Succeeded by | Don Touhig |
| Member of Parliament for Bedwellty |
|
| In office 18 June 1970 – 9 June 1983 |
|
| Preceded by | Harold Finch |
| Succeeded by | Constituency Abolished |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Neil Gordon Kinnock (1942-03-28) 28 March 1942 (age 70) Tredegar, Wales |
| Nationality | Welsh |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | Glenys Kinnock (m. 1967–present) |
| Children | Stephen Kinnock Rachel |
| Religion | Agnostic |
Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock (born 28 March 1942) is a British politician belonging to the Labour Party. He served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995 and as Labour Leader and Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition from 1983 until 1992—his leadership of the party during nearly nine years (all in opposition) making him the longest serving opposition leader in British political history.
Following Labour's defeat in the 1992 election, Kinnock resigned as party leader and after his departure from the House of Commons three years later served as a European Commissioner from 1995–2004. Until the summer of 2009 he was the Chairman of the British Council.[1] Kinnock served as President of Cardiff University from 1998 until 2009. Today, he is regarded as one of Labour's elder statesmen.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Kinnock, an only child, was born in Tredegar, Wales.[2] His father Gordon Herbert Kinnock was a coal miner who suffered from dermatitis and had to find work as a labourer; and his mother Mary Kinnock was a district nurse.[3][4] Gordon died of a heart attack in November 1971 aged 64;[5] Mary died the following month aged 61.[5]
In 1953, 11-year-old Kinnock began his secondary education at Lewis School, Pengam, which he later criticised for its record on caning in schools. He went on to the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, obtaining a degree in industrial relations and history in 1965. A year later, Kinnock obtained a postgraduate diploma in education. Between August 1966 and May 1970, he worked as a tutor for a Workers' Educational Association (WEA).[6]
He has been married to Glenys since 1967. They have two children – son Stephen (born January 1970), and daughter Rachel (born 1971). They now have four grandchildren.[citation needed]Glenys has also served the Labour Party as a Member of European Parliament.
Member of Parliament[link]
In June 1969 he won the Labour Party nomination for the constituency of Bedwellty in Wales (later Islwyn) for the following general election. He was elected on 18 June 1970 and became a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party in October 1978. On becoming an MP for the first time, his father said "Remember Neil, MP stands not just for Member of Parliament, but also for Man of Principle". Labour government policy at the time was in favour of devolution for Wales, but the wider party was split. Calling himself a 'unionist', Kinnock was one of six south Wales Labour MPs to campaign against devolution on centralist, essentially British-nationalist grounds. He dismissed the idea of a Welsh identity, saying that "between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century Wales had practically no history at all, and even before that it was the history of rural brigands who have been ennobled by being called princes".[7] In the Wales referendum, 1979, the proposal for devolution was rejected.
Following Labour's defeat in the 1979 general election, James Callaghan appointed Neil Kinnock to the Shadow Cabinet as Education spokesman. His ambition was noted by other MPs, and David Owen's opposition to the changes to the electoral college was thought to be motivated by the realisation that they would favour Kinnock's succession. He remained as Education spokesman following the resignation of Callaghan as party leader and the election of Michael Foot as his successor in late 1980.
He was known as a left-winger, and gained prominence for his attacks on Margaret Thatcher's handling of the Falklands War in 1982.
Leadership of the Labour Party[link]
First period (1983–1987)[link]
Shortly after Labour's hefty election defeat in June 1983, the almost 70-year-old Michael Foot resigned as leader and from the outset it was expected that Kinnock would succeed him. He was finally elected as Labour Party leader on 2 October 1983, with 71% of the vote, and Roy Hattersley was elected as his deputy; their prospective partnership was considered to be a 'dream ticket'.[8]
His first period as party leader – between the 1983 and 1987 elections – was dominated by his struggle with the hard left, then still strong in the party. Kinnock was determined to move the party's political standing to a centre-left position.[9] Although Kinnock had come from the Tribune left of the party, he parted company with many of his former allies after his appointment to the shadow cabinet.
In 1981, when still Labour's Education spokesman, Kinnock was alleged to have effectively scuppered Tony Benn's attempt to replace Denis Healey as Labour's deputy leader by first supporting the candidacy of the more traditionalist Tribunite John Silkin and then urging Silkin supporters to abstain on the second, run-off, ballot.
All this meant that Kinnock had made plenty of enemies on the left by the time he was elected as leader, though a substantial number of former Bennites gave him strong backing. He was almost immediately in serious difficulty as a result of Arthur Scargill's decision to lead his union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) into a national strike (in opposition to pit closures) without a members' ballot. The NUM was widely regarded as the labour movement's praetorian guard and the strike convulsed the Labour movement.[who?] Kinnock supported the aim of the strike – which he famously dubbed the "case for coal" – but, as an MP from a mining area, was bitterly critical of the tactics employed. In 1985 he made his criticisms public in a speech to Labour's conference:[10]
| “ | The strike wore on. The violence built up because the single tactic chosen was that of mass picketing, and so we saw policing on a scale and with a system that has never been seen in Britain before. The court actions came, and by the attitude to the court actions, the NUM leadership ensured that they would face crippling damages as a consequence. To the question: "How did this position arise?", the man from the lodge in my constituency said: "It arose because nobody really thought it out." | ” |
The strike's defeat early in the year,[11] and the bad publicity associated with the entryism practised by the Militant tendency were the immediate background for the 1985 Labour Party conference.[12] Earlier in the year left-wing councils had protested at Government restriction of their budgets by refusing to set budgets, resulting in a budget crisis in Militant-dominated Liverpool City Council. Kinnock attacked Militant and their conduct in Liverpool in one of the best remembered passages of any post-war British political speech:
| “ | I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council! – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. | ” |
One Liverpool MP, Eric Heffer, a member of the NEC left the conference stage in disgust at Kinnock's comments.[13] In June 1986 the Labour Party finally expelled the deputy leader of Liverpool council, the high profile Militant supporter Derek Hatton, who was found guilty of "manipulating the rules of the district Labour party".[14] By 1986, the party's position appeared to strengthen further with excellent local election results and a thorough rebranding of the party under the direction of Kinnock's director of communications Peter Mandelson.[15] Labour, now sporting a continental social democratic style emblem of a rose, appeared to be able to run the governing Conservatives close, but Margaret Thatcher did not let Labour's makeover go unchallenged.
The Conservatives' 1986 conference was well-managed, and effectively relaunched the Conservatives as a party of radical free-market liberalism. Labour suffered from a persistent image of extremism, especially as Kinnock's campaign to root out Militant dragged on as figures on the hard left of the party tried to stop its progress. Opinion polls showed that voters favoured retaining Britain's nuclear weapons and believed that the Conservatives would be better than Labour at defending the country.[16]
1987 general election[link]
In early 1987, Labour lost a by-election in Greenwich to the Social Democratic Party's Rosie Barnes. As a result, Labour faced the 1987 election in some danger of coming third in the popular vote. In secret, Labour's aim became to secure second place.[17]
Labour fought a professional campaign that at one point scared the Tories into thinking they might lose. Mandelson and his team had revolutionised Labour's communications – a transformation symbolised by a party election broadcast popularly known as "Kinnock: The Movie".[18] This was directed by Hugh Hudson and featured Kinnock's 1985 conference speech, and shots of him and Glenys walking on the Great Orme in Llandudno (so emphasising his appeal as a family man and associating him with images of Wales away from the coalmining communities where he grew up), and a speech to that year's Welsh Labour Party conference asking why he was the "first Kinnock in a thousand generations" to go to university.
Then-Delaware Senator and presidential candidate - and future U.S. Vice President - Joe Biden plagiarized lines from the speech for his own campaign speeches in the summer of 1987.[19]
On polling day, Labour easily took second place, but with only 31 per cent to the SDP-Liberal Alliance's 22 per cent.[20] Labour was still more than ten percentage points behind the Conservatives, who retained a three-figure majority in the House of Commons. However, the Conservative government's majority had come down from 144 in 1983 to 102.[21] Significantly, it had gained 20 seats at the election.[22]
Labour won extra seats in Scotland, Wales and Northern England, but lost ground particularly in Southern England and London, where the Tories still dominated.
Second period (1987–1992)[link]
 |
This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2011) |
The second period of Kinnock's leadership was dominated by his drive to reform the party's policies and so win power. This began with an exercise dubbed the policy review, the most high-profile aspect of which was a series of consultations with the public known as "Labour Listens" in the autumn of 1987.[23]
In organisational terms, the party leadership continued to battle with the Militant tendency, though by now Militant was in retreat in the party and was simultaneously attracted by the opportunities to grow outside Labour's ranks—opportunities largely created by Margaret Thatcher's hugely unpopular poll tax.
After Labour Listens, the party went on, in 1988, to produce a new statement of aims and values—meant to supplement and supplant the formulation of Clause IV of the party's constitution (though, crucially, this was not actually replaced until 1995 under the leadership of Tony Blair) and was closely modelled on Anthony Crosland's social-democratic thinking—emphasising equality rather than public ownership. At the same time the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament was dropped, and reforms of Party Conference and the National Executive meant that local parties lost much of their ability to influence policy.
In 1988, Kinnock was challenged by Tony Benn for the party leadership. Later many identified this as a particularly low period in Kinnock's leadership—as he appeared mired in internal battles after five years of leadership and the Conservatives still dominating the scene and ahead in the opinion polls. In the end, though, Kinnock won a decisive victory over Benn and would soon enjoy a substantial rise in support.[24]
The policy review—reporting in 1989—coincided with Labour's move ahead in the polls as the poll tax row was destroying Conservative support, and Labour won big victories in local by-elections.
In December 1989, he abandoned the Labour policy on closed shops—a decision seen by many as a move away from traditional socialist policies to a more Europe-wide agenda, and also a move to rid the party of its image of being run by the unions.[25]
Kinnock was also perceived as scoring in debates over Margaret Thatcher in the Commons—previously an area in which he was seen as weak—and finally Conservative MPs challenged Thatcher's leadership and she resigned on 22 November 1990 to be succeeded by John Major. Kinnock greeted Thatcher's resignation by describing it as "very good news" and demanded an immediate general election.[26]
Public reaction to Major's elevation was highly positive. A new Prime Minister and the fact that Kinnock was now current leader of a major party reduced the impact of calls for "Time for a Change". Neil Kinnock's showing in the opinion polls dipped; before Thatcher's resignation, Labour had been up to 10 points ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls (an Ipsos MORI poll in April 1990 had actually shown Labour more than 20 points ahead of the Tories), but many opinion polls were actually showing the Tories with more support than Labour, in spite of the deepening recession.[27]
1992 general election, backbenches and retirement[link]
File:Sunkinnock.jpg
Sun headline
In the 1992 election, Labour made considerable progress – reducing the Conservative majority to just 21 seats. It came as a shock to many when the Conservatives won a majority, but the perceived triumphalism of a Labour party rally in Sheffield (together with Kinnock's performance on the podium) may have helped put voters off. Although most of those directly involved in the campaign believe that the rally really came to widespread attention only after the election itself.[28]
In the run-up to the election, held on 9 April 1992, most opinion polls had suggested that the election would end in a hung parliament or a narrow Labour majority.[29]
On the day of the general election, The Sun ran an "infamous"[30] front page featuring Kinnock (headline: 'If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights') that he blamed in his resignation speech for losing Labour the election. In his April 2012 appearance before the Leveson Inquiry Rupert Murdoch stated that the "notorious" headline was both "tasteless and wrong" and led to the editor Kelvin MacKenzie receiving a reprimand.[30]
Kinnock also blamed his defeat on the other newspapers who had backed the Tories in the run-up to the election.[31] However, the traditional Labour supporting Daily Mirror had backed Kinnock at the 1987[32] election and again in 1992.[33]
In the three years leading up to the 1992 election, Labour had consistently topped the opinion polls, with 1991 seeing the Tories (rejuvenated by the arrival of a new leader in John Major the previous November) snatch the lead off Labour more than once before Labour regained it.[34] Since Major's election as leader, Kinnock spent the end of 1990[35] and most of 1991 putting pressure on Major to hold the election that year, but Major had held out and insisted that there would be no general election in 1991.
Kinnock himself later claimed to have half-expected his defeat in the 1992 election and proceeded to turn himself into a media personality, even hosting a chat show on BBC Wales and twice appearing – with considerable success – on the topical panel show Have I Got News For You within a year of the defeat. Many years later, he returned to appear as a guest host of the programme.
Kinnock announced his resignation as Labour Party leader on 13 April 1992, ending eight and a half years in the role - making him the longest serving opposition leader in British political history. He had gained this distinction in November 1990, and no subsequent opposition party leader has yet matched this record.[36]
John Smith, previously Shadow Chancellor, was his successor as party leader.[37]
He remains on the Advisory Council of the Institute for Public Policy Research, which he helped set up in the 1980s.
He was an enthusiastic supporter of Ed Miliband's campaign to lead the Labour Party in 2010, and was reported as telling activists, when Ed Miliband won, "We've got our party back".[38]
Biden incident[link]
Kinnock gained attention in the United States in 1987 when it was discovered that then-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware plagiarized one of Kinnock's speeches during his 1988 presidential campaign in a speech at a Democratic debate in Iowa in August 1987.[39] This led to Biden's withdrawing from the race.[40]
Biden was elected Vice President of the United States in 2008; on 18 January 2009 Glenys Kinnock revealed on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that she and Neil Kinnock had received a personal invitation from Biden to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama and Biden on 20 January 2009 at the United States Capitol in Washington.
European Union Commissioner[link]
Kinnock was appointed one of Britain's two members of the European Commission, which he served first as Transport Commissioner under President Jacques Santer, in early 1995; marking the end of his 25 years in UK parliament.[41] This came less than a year after the death of his successor as Labour leader John Smith and the election of Tony Blair as the party's new leader.[42]
He was obliged to resign as part of the forced, collective resignation of the Commission in 1999, but there was never any suggestion that he himself had done anything corrupt. He was re-appointed to the Commission under new President Romano Prodi. He now became one of the Vice-Presidents of the European Commission. His term of office as a Commissioner was due to expire on 30 October 2004, but was delayed owing to the withdrawal of the new Commissioners. During this second term of office on the Commission, he was responsible for introducing new staff regulations for EU officials, a significant feature of which was substantial salary cuts for everyone employed after 1 May 2004, reduced pension prospects for many others, and gradually worsening employment conditions. This made him disliked by many EU staff members, although the pressure on budgets that largely drove these changes had actually been imposed on the Commission from above by the Member States in Council.
In February 2004 it was announced that with effect from 1 November 2004 Kinnock would become head of the British Council. Coincidentally, at the same time, his son Stephen became head of the British Council branch in St. Petersburg, Russia. At the end of October, it was announced that he would become a member of the House of Lords (intending to be a working peer), when he was able to leave his EU responsibilities. In 1977, he had remained in the House of Commons, with Dennis Skinner, while other MPs walked to the Lords to hear the Queen's speech opening the new parliament. He had dismissed going to the Lords in recent interviews. Kinnock explained his change of attitude, despite the continuing presence of 90 hereditary peers and appointment by patronage, by asserting that the Lords was a good base for campaigning.
See also: Prodi Commission
Life peerage[link]
He was introduced to the House of Lords on 31 January 2005, after being created Baron Kinnock, of Bedwellty in the County of Gwent.[43][44] On assuming his seat he stated, "I accepted the kind invitation to enter the House of Lords as a working peer for practical political reasons." When his peerage was first announced, he said, "It will give me the opportunity... to contribute to the national debate on issues like higher education, research, Europe and foreign policy." His peerage meant that the Labour and Conservative parties were equal in numbers in the upper house of Parliament (since then, the number of Labour members has overtaken the number of Conservative members). Kinnock was a long-time critic of the House of Lords, and his acceptance of a peerage led him to be accused of hypocrisy, by Will Self,[45] among others.[46]
Personal life[link]
He is married to Glenys Kinnock, Britain's Minister for Africa and the United Nations from 2009 to 2010, and a Labour Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1994 to 2009. When she was made a life peer in 2009, they became one of the few couples to both hold titles in their own right. The two met while studying at University College, Cardiff, where they were known as "the power and the glory" (Glenys the power), and they married on 25 March 1967.[47] Previously living together in Peterston-Super-Ely, a village near the western outskirts of Cardiff, in 2008 they moved to Tufnell Park, London, to be closer to their daughter and grandchildren.[48]
They have a son, Stephen and a daughter, Rachel.[49] Stephen is married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Prime Minister of Denmark and leader of the Danish Social Democrats political party. He is assistant director of the British Council in Sierra Leone. Rachel worked in the Political Office at 10 Downing Street under Gordon Brown.
In 1984, Kinnock appeared in the video for the Tracey Ullman song "My Guy" (his daughter was a fan) as a someone with a clipboard canvassing on a council estate. The record reached #23 in the charts.
On 26 April 2006, Neil Kinnock was given a six-month driving ban after being found guilty of two speeding offences along the M4 motorway, west of London.[50]
Neil Kinnock is a lifelong Cardiff City F.C. fan and regularly attends matches.[51]
In 2011 Kinnock took part in the BBC Wales programme Coming Home about his Welsh family history, the programme was broadcast on 30 November 2011.
Kinnock had a cameo role in Sky1's Stella (Episode 3, Series one), first broadcast 19 January 2012.
Satire[link]
The character Paris Geller in popular 2000's U.S. TV programme The Gilmore Girls referred to Kinnock's voice as something she swooned over in her younger days; this may have been a tongue-in-cheek remark. The professor she dated in the series was Michael York who spoke with a strong English accent; Kinnock speaks with a distinct Welsh accent.
In Episode 4 ("Animals") of the British sitcom Men Behaving Badly, Series 1, Dermot (played by Harry Enfield) says to Gary (played by Martin Clunes), "There she was, just standing there, making Michelle Pfeiffer look like Neil Kinnock." He was referring to Kate (played by Louise Hunt).
In 2012 Kinnock made a cameo appearance as himself in an episode of the UK TV comedy drama Stella.
Styles and titles[link]
- Neil Kinnock MP (1970–1983)
- The Rt. Hon. Neil Kinnock MP (1983–1995)
- The Rt. Hon. Neil Kinnock (1995–2005)
- The Rt. Hon. The Lord Kinnock PC (2005–)
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ "Britishcouncil.org". Britishcouncil.org. http://www.britishcouncil.org/new/press-office/press-releases/Lord-Kinnock-to-resign-after-four-and-a-half-outstanding-years-as-Chair-of-the-British-Council/. Retrieved 2 October 2010.
- ^ "South East Wales Public Life - Neil Kinnock - Labour politician from Tredegar". BBC. 1942-03-28. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southeast/halloffame/public_life/neil_kinnock.shtml. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ David Wilsford (1995). Political leaders of contemporary Western Europe: a biographical dictionary. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-313-28623-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=B8iJNlWcdIUC&pg=PA236. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
- ^ Hunter Davis; Frank Herrmann (July 1982). Great Britain. H. Hamilton. p. 173. http://books.google.com/books?id=eaYaAQAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
- ^ a b Eileen Jones (29 April 1994). Neil Kinnock. Hale. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-7090-5239-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=zn1nAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
- ^ Davies, Mark (4 July 2003). "Profile: Neil Kinnock". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3044134.stm.
- ^ Evans, Gwynfor (2000). The Fight for Welsh Freedom. Talybont: Y Lolfa Cyf. p. 7. ISBN 0-86243-515-3.
- ^ "1983: 'Dream ticket' wins Labour leadership". On This Day (BBC News). 2 October 1983. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/2/newsid_2486000/2486483.stm. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ General election: "11 June 1987", BBC Politics 97
- ^ "Leader's speech, Bournemouth 1985: Neil Kinnock (Labour)". British Political Speeches. 3 March 1985. http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=191.
- ^ "1985: Miners call off year-long strike". BBC News. 3 March 1985. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/3/newsid_2515000/2515019.stm.
- ^ For a history of the Militant tendency in the Labour Party, see Eric Shaw Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party: The Politics of Managerial Control in the Labour Party, 1951-87, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p.218-90 and Michael Crick The March of Militant, London: Faber, 1986
- ^ James Naughtie "Labour in Bournemouth", The Guardian, 2 October 1985
- ^ "1986: Labour expels Militant Hatton", BBC On This Day, 12 June
- ^ Lennon, Peter (2 October 1989). "Guarding the good name of the rose". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/1989/oct/02/reshuffle1999.mandelson.
- ^ Anthony King (ed.), British Political Opinion, 1937–2000: The Gallup Polls (Politico's, 2001), pp. 105–7.
- ^ "The rise and fall of New Labour". BBC News. 3 August 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10518842.
- ^ "UK General Election 1987 Campaign - Kinnock the Movie". YouTube. 1987-06-11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFgjCP6qpfU. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ "Joe Biden plagiarised Neil Kinnock speech". The Daily Telegraph (London). 23 August 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/2607505/Joe-Biden-plagiarised-Neil-Kinnock-speech.html.
- ^ "Summary results of the 1987 General Election". Election.demon.co.uk. 1987-06-11. http://www.election.demon.co.uk/ge1987.html. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ "1987: Thatcher's third victory". BBC News. 5 April 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/basics/4393315.stm.
- ^ BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/in_depth/election_battles/1987_over.stm.
- ^ Mark Bevir (2009-03-01). "The Remaking of Labour, 1987-1997". Osb.revues.org. http://osb.revues.org/861. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ Durkin, Paul. "Leadership Elections: Labour Party" (PDF). House of Commons Library. http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-03938.pdf. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
- ^ "1989: Labour's union U-turn". BBC News. 18 December 1989. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/18/newsid_2538000/2538439.stm.
- ^ "Mrs Thatcher Resigns – BBC 1 O'Clock News". YouTube. 2008-09-07. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GgAkMeB-_c. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ "Poll tracker: Interactive guide to the opinion polls". BBC News. 29 September 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8280050.stm.
- ^ Barnard, Stephanie (27 July 2009). "Kinnock came and didn't conquer". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/sheffield/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8170000/8170344.stm.
- ^ "1992: Tories win again against odds". BBC News. 5 April 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/basics/4393317.stm.
- ^ a b Ben Dowell (25 April 2012). "Rupert Murdoch: 'Sun wot won it' headline was tasteless and wrong". Guardian Newspapers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/25/rupert-murdoch-sun-wot-won-it-tasteless?newsfeed=true. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ "1992: Labour's Neil Kinnock resigns". On This Day (BBC News). 13 April 1992. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/13/newsid_2830000/2830895.stm. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=1987+daily+mirror&um=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&tbnid=BnLZCIzYaAo6qM:&imgrefurl=http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/2010/04/20/general-election-2010-a-century-of-daily-mirror-front-pages-115875-22198683/&docid=aNc1HOuYhTwybM&imgurl=http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/m4/apr2010/4/9/image-3-for-general-election-2010-front-pages-gallery-897157967.jpg&w=284&h=350&ei=jYMQT4HGJcX28QOzlpXvAw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=779&vpy=195&dur=1251&hovh=249&hovw=202&tx=147&ty=91&sig=108568670295982046080&page=3&tbnh=126&tbnw=102&start=35&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:35&biw=1024&bih=630
- ^ "General Election 2010 - A century of Daily Mirror front pages - Mirror Online". Mirror.co.uk. 2010-04-20. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/2010/04/20/general-election-2010-a-century-of-daily-mirror-front-pages-115875-22198683/. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/historical-polls/voting-intention-1987-1992
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ "A coal miner's son. (British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock) | HighBeam Business: Arrive Prepared". Business.highbeam.com. 1990-05-14. http://business.highbeam.com/4341/article-1G1-8493082/coal-miner-son. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
- ^ "1992: Labour's Neil Kinnock resigns". BBC News. 13 April 1992. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/13/newsid_2830000/2830895.stm.
- ^ Wheeler, Brian (29 September 2010). ""We've got our party back," says Lord Kinnock". BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11434981. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ Dowd, Maureen (12 September 1987). "Biden's Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DD1531F931A2575AC0A961948260.
- ^ Dionne Jr., E. J. (24 September 1987). "Biden Withdraws Bid for President in Wake of Furor". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DF173AF937A1575AC0A961948260.
- ^ "Conservatives trounced in poll". The Independent (London). 17 February 1995. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/conservatives-trounced-in-poll-1573413.html.
- ^ "1994: Labour chooses Blair". BBC News. 21 July 1994. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/21/newsid_2515000/2515825.stm.
- ^ Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock, thePeerage.com
- ^ House of Lords Journal 238 (Session 2004–05), Monday, 31 January 2005; p. 142
- ^ Notably when Kinnock appeared, as the guest presenter, in an episode of Have I Got News For You, on Friday 3 December 2004
- ^ "Baron Kinnock makes Lords debut". BBC News. 31 January 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4223265.stm. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ Julia Finch, Michael White (5 June 2009). "New faces: Alan Sugar and Glenys Kinnock". The Guardian (UK). http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/05/profile-alan-sugar-glenys-kinnock. Retrieved 8 June 2009.
- ^ Camden New Journal, 10 January 2008, p.10.
- ^ Harper, James (21 July 2002). "Kinnock gives his girl away". Sunday Mirror. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20010722/ai_n14535294/. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ "Neil Kinnock banned from driving". BBC News. 26 April 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4947284.stm. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ "Cardiff's Sunday quest". BBC News. 23 April 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/c/cardiff_city/1944739.stm. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
- ^ "Free thought of the Day". 28 March 2009. http://www.ffrf.org/day/?day=28&month=3.
Further reading[link]
- Martin Westlake and Ian St. John, Kinnock, Little Brown Book Group Limited, 2001. ISBN 0-316-84871-9.
- Peter Kellner, essay on Neil Kinnock in G. Rosen (ed.), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Politicos Publishing, 2001. ISBN 1-902301-18-8
- Michael Leapman, Kinnock, Unwin Hyman, 1987.
- George Drower, Neil Kinnock: The Path to Leadership, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984.
- Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New, Politicos Publishing, 2005 (an account of the Labour Party before, during and after the Kinnock years). ISBN 1-84275-045-3
- Patrick Wintour and Colin Hughes, Labour Rebuilt, Fourth Estate, 1990 (an account of Kinnock's modernisation of the Labour Party).
External links[link]
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Neil Kinnock |
- Neil Kinnock on the Home Secretary’s ambitions, and Cameron
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Neil Kinnock
- Neil Kinnock-2010 Interview
- Dailymail.co.uk, "Kinnock tried gag claims EU whistleblower".
- Announcement of his introduction at the House of Lords House of Lords minutes of proceedings, 31 January 2005
Offices held[link]
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Harold Finch |
Member of Parliament for Bedwellty 1970 – 1983 |
Constituency abolished |
| New constituency | Member of Parliament for Islwyn 1983 – 1995 |
Succeeded by Don Touhig |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by Michael Foot |
Leader of the Labour Party 1983–1992 |
Succeeded by John Smith |
| Preceded by Syd Tierney |
Chair of the Labour Party 1987–1988 |
Succeeded by Dennis Skinner |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Michael Foot |
Leader of the Opposition 1983–1992 |
Succeeded by John Smith |
| Preceded by Bruce Millan |
European Commissioner from the United Kingdom 1995–2004 with Leon Brittan (1995–1999) Chris Patten (1999–2004) |
Succeeded by Peter Mandelson |
| Preceded by Karel Van Miert |
European Commissioner for Transport 1995–1999 |
Succeeded by Loyola de Palacio |
| Preceded by Erkki Liikanen |
European Commissioner for Administrative Reform 1999–2004 |
Succeeded by Siim Kallas |
| Preceded by Leon Brittan |
Vice-President of the European Commission 1999–2004 |
Succeeded by Günter Verheugen |
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Kinnock, Neil |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | British politician |
| Date of birth | 28 March 1942 |
| Place of birth | Tredegar, Wales |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Neil_Kinnock
Related pages:
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Kinnock
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| The Right Honourable The Lord Boateng PC |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| British High Commissioner to South Africa | |
| In office 14 March 2005 – 26 April 2009 |
|
| Prime Minister | Tony Blair Gordon Brown |
| Preceded by | Ann Grant |
| Succeeded by | Nicola Brewer |
| Chief Secretary to the Treasury | |
| In office 29 May 2002 – 5 May 2005 |
|
| Prime Minister | Tony Blair |
| Preceded by | Andrew Smith |
| Succeeded by | Des Browne |
| Financial Secretary to the Treasury | |
| In office 8 June 2001 – 28 May 2002 |
|
| Prime Minister | Tony Blair |
| Preceded by | Stephen Timms |
| Succeeded by | Ruth Kelly |
| Member of Parliament for Brent South |
|
| In office 11 June 1987 – 6 May 2005 |
|
| Preceded by | Laurence Pavitt |
| Succeeded by | Dawn Butler |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1951-06-14) 14 June 1951 (age 61) Hackney, United Kingdom |
| Political party | Labour |
| Relations | Kwaku Boateng (father) |
| Alma mater | University of Bristol |
| Profession | Solicitor Barrister |
| Religion | Methodism |
Paul Yaw Boateng, Baron Boateng (born 14 June 1951) is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent South from 1987 to 2005, becoming the UK's first black Cabinet Minister in May 2002, when he was appointed as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Following his departure from the House of Commons, he served as the British High Commissioner to South Africa from March 2005 to May 2009. He was introduced as a member of the House of Lords on 1 July 2010.
Contents |
Background and early life[link]
Boateng was born in Hackney, London of mixed Ghanaian and Scottish heritage; his family later moved to Ghana when Boateng was four years old. His father, Kwaku Boateng, was a lawyer and cabinet minister under Kwame Nkrumah. There, Boateng attended Accra Academy High School. Boateng's life in Ghana came to an abrupt end with the jailing of his father in 1966 after a coup against Nkrumah. His father was imprisoned without trial for four years. Boateng, then 15, and his sister fled to Britain with their mother.
They settled in Hemel Hempstead where he attended Apsley Grammar School. He read law at the University of Bristol and began his career in civil rights, originally as a solicitor, though he later retrained as a barrister. He worked primarily on social and community cases, involving women's rights, housing and police complaints, including a period from 1977-1981 as the legal advisor for the Scrap Sus Campaign. He represented Cherry Groce, a mother of six who was shot and paralysed by a police officer during a raid on her home in the search for her son.[1] He became a partner at the firm B M Birnberg & Co, and as a barrister, he practiced at Eight King's Bench Walk.
Political career[link]
Boateng was elected to the Greater London Council for Walthamstow in 1981, which was then under the leadership of Ken Livingstone. Boateng was only the second person of Afro-Caribbean descent to be elected to the GLC. As chair of the GLC's police committee and vice-chair of its ethnic minorities committee, he advocated greater accountability in the Metropolitan Police and spoke out against racism in relation to their dealings with the black and Asian communities.
Member of Parliament[link]
He stood, and lost, as a parliamentary candidate for Hertfordshire West (which included his former home town of Hemel Hempstead) in the 1983 general election. He won in the general election of 1987, when he became the MP for Brent South in succession to Laurence Pavitt, being one of the first three black MPs (the others being Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott). During his victory speech he said: "We can never be free in Brent until South Africa is free too." He then famously declared, "Today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto!"
Like many other members of the left in the 1980s, he became more moderate under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, who made him a junior Treasury spokesman in 1989, making him the first black person to join the front bench as a party spokesperson. His portoflio included economics, industrial strategies and corporate responsibility.[2] In 1992, he became shadow minister for the Lord Chancellor's Department, a post he held until the 1997 general election, where he was a strong advocate for increasing pro bono legal services among UK law firms.[3]
Ministerial career[link]
With Labour's victory, Boateng became the UK's first black government minister as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, where he was responsible for social services and mental health. In that position, he published guidelines to end the denial of adoptions purely on the basis of race.[4]
In 1998 Boateng became a Minister of State at the Home Office and subsequently became Number 2 Minister at the home Office. He was made a Privy Councilor in 1999. He earned a reputation for being tough on crime, particularly with regards to aggressive begging on the streets.[5] He also worked with Eric Holder, who was then Deputy Attorney General, and Louis Freeh, then Director of the FBI on issues related to international drug trafficking and interdiction.[6]
His portfolio was expanded in 2000, and he became the first Minister for Young People, where his priority was to listen to and be a voice for Britain's youth.[7] He launched the Youth, Citizenship and Social Change programme, then the UK's largest research project designed to examine social exclusion and promoting citizenship among young people.[8] He also played a leading role in establishing and launching the £450m Children's Fund designed to tackle child poverty.[9] Boateng's ministerial colleagues encouraged him to stand as the Labour candidate to be the Mayor of London; however, he ruled himself out and strongly criticised his former GLC colleague Ken Livingstone. Boateng supported the candidacy of Frank Dobson, with whom he had served in the Department of Health.
Cabinet history[link]
In 2001, he was made Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and was promoted to the position of Chief Secretary to the Treasury in May 2002, making history as Britain's first black cabinet minister. He was quoted as saying "My colour is part of me but I do not choose to be defined by my colour." His appointment was greeted with praise by civil rights activists who said that his appointment gave hope to young black youths and would inspire them to become involved in politics.[10] To commemorate this historic achievement, Parliament commissioned a painting of Boateng by Jonathan Yeo, which is displayed in the collection of 21st Century Parliamentarians.[11]
In his role as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he was responsible for finalising the Spending Review of 2002 and leading the Spending Review of 2004. Boateng, coordinating with Sir Peter Gershon's report, announced in 2004 the government's efficiency programme to save over £20 billion in the public sector.[12]
Boateng played a leading role in coordinating the Every Child Matters policy paper, which called for the reform of children's services, including greater accountability and coordination among government agencies.[13] He was also a passionate advocate for increasing development aid to Africa and the developing nations. Foreshadowing his future role, he made numerous trips to Africa, meeting with business and government leaders in an effort to highlight the fact that international aid and the Millenium Development Goals were key priorities for the government.[14][15][16] Boateng also assisted Gordon Brown in drafting the Africa Commission report, which called for increasing aid to Africa from Western nations to $50 billion a year[17][18] In March 2005, Boateng announced that he would not stand for re-election as an MP in the May 2005 general election. Dawn Butler was selected by the Constituency Labour Party to replace him and was elected in Brent South.
High Commissioner to South Africa[link]
Due to Boateng's passion and enthusiasm for the government's Africa Commission Report and his associations with African leaders[19] Tony Blair named him to be the next High Commissioner to South Africa for a term of four years.[20][17] Many Africans praised the appointment, stating that it was an important symbolic break from Britain's colonial past and saw it as a symbol of Tony Blair's commitment to the continent. Boateng is credited with building a close relationship to South Africa's ANC government, and it was reported that he privately worked to bring together bitter rivals in the crisis in Zimbabwe, [21] although he publicly condemned the Zimbabwean government's illegal occupation of land from white farmers[22] and the resulting turmoil, which Boateng labeled a "human rights crisis."[23] He has also addressed the World Economic Forum on issues concerning Africa.[24][25] In 2008, he participated in a number of talks with political leaders in the United States to encourage them to support the Doha Development Round trade negotiations that would open Western markets to goods from Africa and other developing countries.[26] His tenure as High Commissioner ended in May 2009.
Appointment to the House of Lords[link]
On 28 May 2010, it was announced in the 2010 Dissolution Honours that Boateng would become a member of the House of Lords.[27] He was introduced as Lord Boateng of Akyem and Wembley on 1 July 2010; he was supported by Lord Ouseley and Lord Janner. His maiden speech to the House of Lords highlighted the needs of poor and disadvantaged children, both in rural and urban areas. He called on the Government to examine the impact that the Budget and forthcoming Spending Review would have on children at risk.[28] In December of 2011, he initiated a debate in the House of Lords to discuss cuts in funding to the Citizens Advice Bureau centres, which Lord Boateng vehemently opposed.[29]
Career outside of politics[link]
Boateng is an active Methodist and Methodist lay preacher;[30] he served as a Methodist delegate to the World Council of Churches and as Vice-Moderator of its program to combat racism. He previously served on the board of the English National Opera (1984 to 1997) and the English Touring Opera (1993 to 1997). During the historic South African General Elections of 1994, he was a member of the delegation sent by the Association of Western European Parliamentarians Against Apartheid to monitor the elections. In 1993, he also wrote the foreword to the Harper Collins collected works edition of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.[31] He's been a commentator and television presenter, most notably for Channel 4's "Nothing But The Truth" and the BBC Radio 4's "Looking Forward to the Past."[32]
In 1988, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference honored Boateng as the recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for his contributions to the field of civil rights.[33] He received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in 2004[34] and the University of Bristol in 2007.[35] He is currently a non-executive Director of Aegis Defence Services, a private security, military and risk management company.[36][37] He also serves on the executive board of the international Christian charity, Food for the Hungry.[38]
References[link]
- ^ "BBC ON THIS DAY | 15 | 1987: Officer cleared in Groce shooting case". BBC News. 15 January 1973. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/15/newsid_2530000/2530537.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Paul Boateng". 100 Great Black Britons. 29 May 2002. http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/bios/paul_boateng.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ 11 July 1995 (11 July 1995). "Pro Bono Work Needs Greater Support". Thelawyer.com. http://www.thelawyer.com/pro-bono-work-needs-greater-support/101979.article. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "UK | Adoption rules to end 'misguided' practices". BBC News. 18 November 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/160106.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "UK | Crackdown on beggars signalled". BBC News. 12 March 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/675049.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Ministerial Meetings (US) (Hansard, 29 October 1999)". Hansard.millbanksystems.com. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1999/oct/29/ministerial-meetings-us. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Paul Boateng: 'We understand the vital importance of feedback' - Education News, Education". London: The Independent. 14 December 2002. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/paul-boateng-we-understand-the-vital-importance-of-feedback-610826.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "British Youth In the Spotlight". BBC News. 23 June 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/375505.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Poor Children to Get Help". BBC News. 15 November 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1023683.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Black Minister Makes Cabinet History". BBC News. 29 May 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2014444.stm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Artwork - Paul Boateng MP - UK Parliament". Parliament.uk. 20 April 2010. http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/jonathan-yeo/portrait-of-paul-boateng-/6483. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "2004 Spending Review: A drive for £20bn efficiencies following Gershon review". PublicTechnology.net. 13 July 2004. http://www.publictechnology.net/content/1378. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Every child matters". Pgce.soton.ac.uk. http://www.pgce.soton.ac.uk/ict/NewPGCE/ECM.htm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Boateng meets Ghanaian economic community, civil society". ModernGhana.com. http://www.modernghana.com/news/72120/1/boateng-meets-ghanaian-economic-community-civil-so.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "afrol News - Britain pays part of Ghana's debts". Afrol.com. http://www.afrol.com/articles/15628. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Financial Mail - SA CAST IN BIG ROLE IN AFRICA". Secure.financialmail.co.za. 03 September 2004. http://secure.financialmail.co.za/04/0903/focus/ffocus.htm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ a b Landberg, Reed V. (14 March 2005). "U.K. Treasury's Boateng to Take Job in South Africa (Update1)". Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aH1be1IRHEiQ&refer=uk. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "[ARCHIVED CONTENT] Speech by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury , Paul Boateng MP, at the South Africa Conference - HM Treasury". Webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speech_cst_241003.htm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article73391.ece/A-diplomat-with-Africa-in-his-veins
- ^ Boateng Moved to Africa Post[dead link]
- ^ "A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama". The Spectator. 12 March 2008. http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/552766/part_3/a-diplomat-who-could-yet-be-the-british-obama.thtml. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Zimbabwe broke land deal". Newzimbabwe.com. http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/farm59.16552.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ "A crocodile with two stomachs; the World Economic Forum". SABCNews. http://www.sabcnews.com/portal/site/SABCNews/menuitem.5c4f8fe7ee929f602ea12ea1674daeb9/?vgnextoid=fbdfa2ac4e16d110VgnVCM10000077d4ea9bRCRD&vgnextfmt=default. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ http://www.weforum.org/en/media/Latest%20News%20Releases/PRESSRELEASES124
- ^ "UK Envoy Calls for Urgent Citizen Advocacy on Trade". Allafrica.com. 18 March 2008. http://allafrica.com/stories/200803181246.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "At a glance: The new working peers | Politics | guardian.co.uk". London: Guardian. 2010-05-28. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/28/peers-dissolution-honours-list/. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ Department of the Official Report (Hansard), House of Lords, Westminster. "Lords Hansard text for 22 Jul 201022 July 2010 (pt 0001)". Publications.parliament.uk. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/100722-0001.htm#10072235000563. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/111208-0002.htm
- ^ "Methodist serves as Britain's first black Cabinet minister". Wfn.org. 13 January 2003. http://www.wfn.org/2003/01/msg00066.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Patricia Latkin". Jasna.org. http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number15/latkin2.htm. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "The Lord Boateng, PC Authorised Biography – Debrett’s People of Today, The Lord Boateng, PC Profile". Debretts.com. 14 June 1951. http://www.debretts.com/people/biographies/browse/b/14929/Paul%20Yaw%20Boateng+BOATENG.aspx. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ [2][dead link]
- ^ "Lincoln University". Lincoln.edu. http://www.lincoln.edu/marketing/pr/news042904.html. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ "Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng: Doctor of Laws - University of Bristol". Bristol.ac.uk. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pace/graduation/honorary-degrees/hondeg07/boateng.html. Retrieved 2011-10-29.
- ^ "AEGIS - About Us". Aegisworld.com. http://www.aegisworld.com/index.php/about-us-2. Retrieved 2011-10-29.
- ^ "Advisory Committee on Business Appointments | Home". Acoba.independent.gov.uk. http://acoba.independent.gov.uk/former_crown_servants_appointments.aspx. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
- ^ http://www.fh.org/who/leadership
External links[link]
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| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Laurence Pavitt |
Member of Parliament for Brent South 1987–2005 |
Succeeded by Dawn Butler |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Andrew Smith |
Chief Secretary to the Treasury 2002–2005 |
Succeeded by Des Browne |
| Diplomatic posts | ||
| Preceded by Ann Grant |
British High Commissioner to South Africa 2005–2009 |
Succeeded by Nicola Brewer |
|
|||||||
.svg)
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Boateng, Paul |
| Alternative names | Boateng, Paul Yaw |
| Short description | Politician and the UK's first black Cabinet minister |
| Date of birth | 14 June 1951 |
| Place of birth | Hackney, London, England |
| Date of death | Living |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Paul_Boateng
Related pages:
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Boateng
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
For other people named Michael Foot, see Michael Foot (disambiguation).
| The Right Honourable Michael Foot FRSL PC |
|
|---|---|
| File:Michael Foot 1982.jpg | |
| Foot in 1982 | |
| Leader of the Opposition | |
| In office 4 November 1980 – 2 October 1983 |
|
| Prime Minister | Margaret Thatcher |
| Preceded by | James Callaghan |
| Succeeded by | Neil Kinnock |
| Leader of the Labour Party | |
| In office 4 November 1980 – 2 October 1983 |
|
| Deputy | Denis Healey |
| Preceded by | James Callaghan |
| Succeeded by | Neil Kinnock |
| Deputy Leader of the Labour Party | |
| In office 5 April 1976 – 4 November 1980 |
|
| Leader | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Denis Healey |
| Shadow Leader of the House of Commons | |
| In office 4 May 1979 – 4 November 1980 |
|
| Leader | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Norman St John-Stevas |
| Succeeded by | John Silkin |
| Leader of the House of Commons | |
| In office 8 April 1976 – 4 May 1979 |
|
| Prime Minister | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Norman St John-Stevas |
| Lord President of the Council | |
| In office 8 April 1976 – 4 May 1979 |
|
| Prime Minister | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Christopher Soames |
| Secretary of State for Employment | |
| In office 5 March 1974 – 8 April 1976 |
|
| Prime Minister | Harold Wilson |
| Preceded by | William Whitelaw |
| Succeeded by | Albert Booth |
| Member of Parliament for Blaenau Gwent Ebbw Vale (1960-1992) |
|
| In office 17 November 1960 – 9 April 1992 |
|
| Preceded by | Aneurin Bevan |
| Succeeded by | Llew Smith |
| Member of Parliament for Plymouth Devonport |
|
| In office 5 July 1945 – 26 May 1955 |
|
| Preceded by | Leslie Hore-Belisha |
| Succeeded by | Joan Vickers |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Michael Mackintosh Foot (1913-07-23)23 July 1913 Plymouth, Devon, England |
| Died | 3 March 2010(2010-03-03) (aged 96) Hampstead, London, England |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | Jill Craigie (m. 1949–1999, her death) |
| Relations | Isaac Foot (father) |
| Alma mater | Wadham College, Oxford |
| Religion | None (Atheism) |
Michael Mackintosh Foot, FRSL, PC (23 July 1913 – 3 March 2010) was a British Labour Party politician, journalist and author, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1955 and from 1960 until 1992. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980, and later became the Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983.[1]
Associated with the Labour left for most of his career, he was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and British withdrawal from the European Economic Community. He was first promoted to Cabinet as Employment secretary under Harold Wilson in 1974, and later served as Leader of the House of Commons under James Callaghan. A passionate orator, he was Labour leader at the 1983 general election when the party received its lowest share of the vote since 1918.[2]
His parallel career as a journalist included appointments as editor of Tribune, on several occasions, and the Evening Standard newspaper. Among the books he authored are Guilty Men (an attack on Neville Chamberlain and others for the policy of appeasement), a biography of Jonathan Swift (The Pen and the Sword, 1957) and a biography of Aneurin Bevan.
Contents |
Family[link]
Foot's parents were Eva (Mackintosh) and Isaac Foot (1880–1960), a solicitor and founder of the Plymouth law firm Foot and Bowden (which merged with another firm to become Foot Anstey). Isaac Foot was an active member of the Liberal Party and was Liberal Member of Parliament for Bodmin in Cornwall 1922–1924 and 1929–1935 and a Lord Mayor of Plymouth.[3]
Michael Foot's elder brothers were Sir Dingle Foot MP (1905–1978), a Liberal and subsequently Labour MP; Hugh Foot, Baron Caradon (1907–1990), a Governor of Cyprus, a representative of the United Kingdom at the United Nations from 1964 to 1970, and father to campaigning journalist Paul Foot (1937–2004) and charity worker Oliver Foot (1946–2008); and Liberal politician John Foot, Baron Foot (1909–1999).
Foot had three other siblings: Margaret Elizabeth Foot (1911–1965), Jennifer Mackintosh Highet[4] (born 1916) and Christopher Isaac Foot (born 1917).[5]
Early life[link]
Michael Foot was born in Lipson Terrace, Plymouth, Devon, the fifth of seven children of Isaac and Eva[6] (née Mackintosh, died 17 May 1946), a Scotswoman.[7] He was educated at Plymouth College Preparatory School and Leighton Park School in Reading. He then went on to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Wadham College, Oxford. Foot was the President of the Oxford Union. He also took part in the ESU USA Tour (the debating tour of the USA run by the English-Speaking Union). On graduating in 1934, he took a job as a shipping clerk in Birkenhead. Foot was profoundly influenced by the poverty and unemployment that he witnessed in Liverpool, which was on a different scale from anything he had seen in Plymouth. A Liberal up to this time, Foot was converted to socialism by Oxford University Labour Club president David Lewis and others: "... I knew him [at Oxford] when I was a Liberal [and Lewis] played a part in converting me to socialism."[8] Foot joined the Labour Party and first stood for parliament at the age of 22 in the 1935 general election, when he contested Monmouth. During this election Foot criticised the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, for seeking rearmament. In his election address Foot contended that "the armaments race in Europe must be stopped now".[9] Foot also supported unilateral disarmament, after multilateral disarmament talks at Geneva had broken down in 1933.[10]
He became a journalist, working briefly on the New Statesman, before joining the left-wing weekly Tribune when it was set up in early 1937 to support the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist United Front between Labour and the parties to its left. The campaign's members were Stafford Cripps's (Labour-affiliated) Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP). Foot resigned in 1938 after the paper's first editor, William Mellor, was fired for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement. In a 1955 interview, Foot ideologically identified as a libertarian socialist.[11]
Journalism[link]
On the recommendation of Aneurin Bevan, Foot was soon hired by Lord Beaverbrook to work as a writer on his Evening Standard. (Bevan is supposed to have told Beaverbrook on the phone: "I've got a young bloody knight-errant here. They sacked his boss, so he resigned. Have a look at him.") At the outbreak of the Second World War, Foot volunteered for military service, but was rejected because of his chronic asthma. It has been suggested (2011) that he became a member of the secret Auxiliary Units.
In 1940, under the pen-name "Cato" he and two other Beaverbrook journalists (Frank Owen, editor of the Standard, and Peter Howard of the Daily Express) published Guilty Men, a Left Book Club book attacking the appeasement policy of the Chamberlain government that became a run-away best-seller. Beaverbrook made Foot editor of the Evening Standard in 1942 at the age of 28. During the war Foot made a speech that was later featured during The World at War documentary TV series broadcast in February 1974.[12] Foot was speaking in defence of the Daily Mirror, which had criticised the conduct of the war by the Churchill Government. He mocked the notion that the Government would make no more territorial demands of other newspapers if they allowed the Mirror to be censored.
Foot left the Standard in 1945 to join the Daily Herald as a columnist. The Daily Herald was jointly owned by the TUC and Odhams Press, and was effectively an official Labour Party paper. He rejoined Tribune as editor from 1948 to 1952, and was again the paper's editor from 1955 to 1960. Throughout his political career he railed against the increasing corporate domination of the press, entertaining a special loathing for Rupert Murdoch.
Member of Parliament[link]
 |
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010) |
Foot fought the Plymouth Devonport constituency in the 1945 general election. His election agent was Labour activist and life-long friend Ron Lemin. He won the seat for Labour for the first time, holding it until his surprise defeat by Dame Joan Vickers at the 1955 general election. Until 1957, he was the most prominent ally of Aneurin Bevan, who had taken Cripps's place as leader of the Labour left, though Foot and Bevan fell out after Bevan renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1957 Labour Party conference.
Before the cold war began in the late 1940s, Foot favoured a 'third way' foreign policy for Europe (he was joint author with Richard Crossman and Ian Mikardo of the pamphlet Keep Left in 1947), but in the wake of the communist seizure of power in Hungary and Czechoslovakia he and Tribune took a strongly anti-communist position, eventually embracing NATO.
Foot was however a critic of the west's handling of the Korean War, an opponent of West German rearmament in the early 1950s and a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Under his editorship, Tribune opposed both the British government's Suez adventure and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. In this period he made regular television appearances on the current affairs programmes In The News (BBC) and subsequently Free Speech (ITV). "There was certainly nothing wrong with his television technique in those days", reflected Anthony Howard shortly after Foot's death.[13]
Foot returned to parliament in 1960 at a by-election in Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire, left vacant by Bevan's death. He had the Labour whip withdrawn in March 1961 after rebelling against the Labour leadership over air force estimates. He only returned to the Parliamentary Labour Group in 1963 when Harold Wilson became Labour leader after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell.
Harold Wilson – the subject of an enthusiastic campaign biography by Foot published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1964 – offered Foot a place in his first government, but Foot turned it down. Instead he became the leader of Labour's left opposition from the back benches, dazzling the Commons with his command of rhetoric. He opposed the government's moves to restrict immigration, join the Common Market and reform the trade unions, was against the Vietnam War and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, and denounced the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968. He also famously allied with the Tory right-winger Enoch Powell to scupper the government's plan to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers and create a House of Lords comprising only life peers – a "seraglio of eunuchs" as Foot put it.
In 1967, Foot challenged James Callaghan but failed to win the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party.
In government[link]
After 1970, Labour moved to the left and Wilson came to an accommodation with Foot. In April 1972, he stood for the Deputy Leadership of the party, along with Edward Short and Anthony Crosland. Short defeated Foot in the second ballot after Crosland had been eliminated in the first.
When, in 1974, Labour returned to office under Harold Wilson, Foot became Secretary of State for Employment. According to Ben Pimlott, his appointment was intended to please the left of the party and the Trade Unions. In this role, he played the major part in the government's efforts to maintain the trade unions' support. He was also responsible for the Health and Safety at Work Act. Foot was one of the mainstays of the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Economic Community. When Wilson retired in 1976, Foot contested the party leadership and led in the first ballot, but was ultimately defeated by James Callaghan. Later that year, Foot was elected Deputy Leader and served as Leader of the House of Commons, which gave him the unenviable task of trying to maintain the survival of the Callaghan government as its majority evaporated.
In 1975, Foot, along with Jennie Lee and others, courted controversy when they supported Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, after she prompted the declaration of a state of emergency. In December 1975, The Times ran an editorial titled 'Is Mr Foot a Fascist?' – their answer was that he was[14] – after Norman Tebbit accused him of 'undiluted fascism' once Foot said that the Ferrybridge Six deserved dismissal for defying a closed shop.[15]
Labour leadership[link]
Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan remained party leader for the next 18 months before he resigned and Foot was elected Labour leader on 4 November 1980, beating Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election (the last leadership contest to involve only Labour MPs). Foot presented himself as a compromise candidate capable, unlike Healey, of uniting the party, which at the time was riven by the grassroots left-wing insurgency centred around Tony Benn.
The Bennites demanded revenge for the betrayals, as they saw them, of the Callaghan government, and pushed the case for replacement of MPs who had acquiesced to them by left-wingers who would support the causes of unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the Common Market and widespread nationalisation. (Benn did not stand for the leadership: apart from Foot and Healey, the other candidates – both eliminated in the first round – were John Silkin, a Tribunite like Foot, and Peter Shore, an anti-European right-winger.)
When he became leader, Foot was already 67 and frail. The Tory government was dividing the country and proving highly controversial as its monetarist economic policies to reduce inflation were contributing to a significant rise in unemployment which had helped plunge Britain's economy into recession earlier in 1980. As a result, Labour had moved ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls, and in the aftermath of Foot's election as leader opinion polls showed a double-digit lead for Labour, boosting his hopes of becoming prime minister by the time of the next general election, which had to be held by May 1984.
Almost immediately after his election as leader he was faced with a serious crisis: the creation in early 1981 of a breakaway party by four senior Labour right-wingers, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers (the so-called "Gang of Four"), the Social Democratic Party. This was largely seen as the consequence of the Labour Party's swing to the left, polarising divisions in an already divided party.[16]
The SDP won the support of large sections of the media, and for most of 1981 and early 1982 its opinion poll ratings suggested that it could at least overtake Labour and possibly win a general election, as the Tories were proving unpopular because of the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, which had seen unemployment reach a postwar high.
With the Labour left still strong – in 1981 Benn decided to challenge Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, a contest Healey won narrowly – Foot struggled to make an impact and was widely criticised for it, though his performances in the Commons, most notably on the Falklands war of 1982, won him widespread respect from other parliamentarians, though he was criticised by some on the left who felt that he should not have supported the Thatcher government's immediate resort to military action. The right-wing newspapers nevertheless lambasted him consistently for what they saw as his bohemian eccentricity, attacking him for wearing what they described as a "donkey jacket" (actually he wore a type of duffel coat)[17] at the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in November 1981, for which he was likened to an "out-of-work navvy" by one of Labour's own MPs.[18] Foot did not make it generally known that HM the Queen Mother had complimented him on it; he later donated the garment to the People's History Museum in Manchester.[19]
The formation of the SDP - who formed an alliance with the Liberal Party in June 1981 - contributed to a fall in Labour support. The double-digit lead which had still been intact in opinion polls at the start of 1981 was swiftly wiped out, and by the end of October the opinion polls were showing the Alliance ahead of Labour. Labour briefly regained their lead of most opinion polls in early 1982, but when the Falklands conflict ended on 14 June 1982 with a British victory over Argentina, opinion polls showed the Tories firmly in the lead. Their position at the top of the polls was strengthened by the return to economic growth later in the year. It was looking certain that the Tories would be re-elected, and the only key issue that the media were still speculating by the end of 1982 was whether it would be Labour or the Alliance who formed the next opposition.[20]
Through late 1982 and early 1983, there was constant speculation that Labour MPs would replace Foot with Healey as leader. Such speculation increased after Labour lost the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, in which Peter Tatchell was its candidate, standing against a Tory, a Liberal (eventual winner Simon Hughes) and the right wing John O'Grady, who had declared himself the "real" Labour candidate and fought an openly homophobic campaign against Tatchell. Critically, Labour held on in a subsequent by-election in Darlington and Foot remained leader for the 1983 general election.
Resignation[link]
The 1983 Labour manifesto, strongly socialist in tone, advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and a return to a more interventionist industrial policy. The manifesto also pledged that a Labour government would abolish the House of Lords, nationalise banks and leave the then European Economic Community. Foot's Labour Party lost to the Conservatives in a landslide – a result which had been widely predicted by the opinion polls since the previous summer. The only consolation for Foot and Labour was that they did not lose their place in opposition to the SDP-Liberal Alliance, who came close to them in terms of votes but were still a long way behind in terms of seats.[21] Despite this, Foot was very critical of the Alliance, accusing them of "siphoning" Labour support and enabling the Tories to win more seats.[22]
The Daily Mirror was the only major newspaper to back Foot and Labour at the 1983 general election, urging its readers to vote Labour and "Stop the waste of our nation, for your job your children and your future" in response to the mass unemployment that had resulted from Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher's monetarist economic policies to reduce inflation. Most other newspapers had urged their readers to vote Tory.[23]
Foot resigned days after the election and was succeeded as leader on 2 October by Neil Kinnock, who had been tipped from the outset to be Labour's choice of new leader.
Gerald Kaufman, once Harold Wilson's press officer and during the 1980s prominent on the Labour right, described the 1983 Labour manifesto as "the longest suicide note in history". As a statement on internal democracy, Foot passed the edict that the manifesto would consist of all resolutions arrived at conference. The party also failed to master the medium of television, while Foot addressed public meetings around the country, and made some radio broadcasts, in the same manner as Clement Attlee in 1945. Members joked that they had not expected Foot to allow the slogan "Think positive, Act positive, Vote Labour" on grammatical grounds.[citation needed]
In 1986, Foot was the subject of one of the best-known newspaper headlines of all time. The Times ran an article about Foot, who had been put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee. The headline stated "Foot Heads Arms Body." Although originally written as a joke by editor Martyn Cornell, the paper ran it.[24]
Backbenches and retirement[link]
Foot took a back seat in Labour politics after 1983 and retired from the House of Commons at the 1992 general election, when Labour lost to the Tories (now led by John Major) for the fourth election in succession, but remained politically active. From 1987 to 1992, he was the oldest sitting British MP (preceding former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath). He defended Salman Rushdie, the novelist who was subject to a fatwā requiring Rushdie's execution by Ayatollah Khomeini, and took a strongly pro-interventionist position against Serbia during its conflict with Croatia and Bosnia, supporting NATO forces whilst citing defence of civilian populations in the latter countries. In addition he was among the Patrons of the British-Croatian Society.[25] The Guardian's political editor Michael White criticised Foot's "overgenerous" support for Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman.[26]
Foot remained a high-profile member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote several books, including highly regarded biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H. G. Wells. Indeed, he was a distinguished Vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society. Many of his friends have said publicly that they regret that he ever gave up literature for politics.
Foot was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.[citation needed] He was elected in 1988 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[citation needed]
In a poll of Labour party activists he was voted the worst post-war Labour party leader.[27] Though Foot is considered by many a failure as Labour leader, his biographer Mervyn Jones strongly makes the case that no one else could have held Labour together at the time, particularly in the face of the strength of Militant tendency.[citation needed] Foot is remembered with affection in Westminster as a great parliamentarian. He was widely liked, and admired for his integrity and generosity of spirit, by both his colleagues and opponents.[citation needed]
A portrait of Foot by the artist Robert Lenkiewicz now permanently hangs in Portcullis House, Westminster.
Gordievsky allegations[link]
Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to Britain in 1985, made allegations against Foot in his 1995 memoirs.[28] The Sunday Times, which serialised Gordievsky's book under the headline "KGB: Michael Foot was our agent", claimed in an article of 19 February that the Soviet intelligence services regarded Foot as an "agent of influence", codenamed "Agent BOOT", and in the pay of the KGB for many years. Crucially, the newspaper used material from the original manuscript of the book which had not been included in the published version.[29] At the time a leading article in The Independent newspaper asserted: "It seems extraordinary that such an unreliable figure should now be allowed, given the lack of supporting evidence, to damage the reputation of figures such as Mr Foot."[30] In a February 1992 interview, Gordievsky had claimed that he had no further Labour Party revelations to make.[30] Foot successfully sued the Sunday Times, winning "substantial" damages.[29]
However, in the Daily Telegraph in 2010 Charles Moore gave a "full account", which he claimed had been provided to him by Gordievsky shortly after Foot's death, of the extent of Foot's alleged KGB involvement. Moore also wrote that, although the claims are difficult to corroborate without MI6 and KGB files, Gordievsky's past record in revealing KGB contacts in Britain had been shown to be reliable.[31]
Plymouth Argyle[link]
Foot was a passionate supporter of Plymouth Argyle Football Club from his childhood and once remarked that he wasn't going to die until he had seen them play in the Premier League.[32] He served for several years as a director of the club, seeing two promotions under his tenure.[33]
For his 90th birthday, Foot was registered with the Football League as an honorary player and given the shirt number 90. This made him officially the oldest registered professional player in the history of football.[33][34]
Personal life[link]
Foot had no children.[35] He was married to the film-maker, author and feminist historian Jill Craigie (1911–1999) from 1949 until her death.
In February 2007, it was revealed that Foot engaged in an extramarital affair with a black woman around 35 years his junior in the early 1970s. The affair, which lasted nearly a year, put a considerable strain on his marriage. The affair is detailed in Foot's official biography, published in March 2007.[36]
On 23 July 2006, his 93rd birthday, Michael Foot became the longest-lived leader of a major British political party, passing Lord Callaghan's record of 92 years, 364 days.
A staunch republican (though actually well liked by the Royal Family on a personal level),[36] Foot rejected honours from the Queen and the government, including a knighthood and a peerage, on more than one occasion.
Health[link]
Foot suffered from asthma until 1963 (which disqualified him from service in World War II) and eczema until middle age.[37]
In October 1963 he was involved in a car crash, suffering pierced lungs, broken ribs, and a broken left leg. He subsequently used a walking stick for the rest of his life.[38] According to former MP Tam Dalyell, Foot had up to the accident been a chain-smoker, but gave up the habit thereafter.[39]
In 1976, Foot became blind in one eye following an attack of shingles.[40]
Death[link]
Foot died at his Hampstead, North London home in the morning of 3 March 2010. The House of Commons was informed of the news later that day by Justice Secretary Jack Straw,[41] who told the House: "I am sure that this news will be received with great sadness not only in my own party but across the country as a whole."[42] Foot's funeral was a non-religious service, held on 15 March 2010 at Golders Green Crematorium in North West London.[43]
Fictional depiction[link]
Foot was portrayed by Patrick Godfrey in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis' long unproduced The Falklands Play and by Michael Pennington in the film The Iron Lady.
Notes[link]
- ^ "1980: Michael Foot is new Labour leader". BBC News. 10 November 1980. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/10/newsid_4699000/4699939.stm.
- ^ Kelly, Richard (2 June 2003). "Not as daft as you thought". New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/200306020008. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Foot, John (1998). "Isaac Foot". In Duncan Brack. Dictionary of Liberal Biography. Malcolm Baines, Katie Hall, Graham Lippiatt, Tony Little, Mark Pack, Geoffrey Sell, Jen Tankard (1st ed.). Artillery Row, London: Politico's Publishing. pp. 109–112. ISBN 1-902301-09-9.
- ^ "Person Page – 23646". thePeerage.com. 25 October 2007. http://www.thepeerage.com/p23646.htm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Person Page – 23642". thePeerage.com. 30 June 2007. http://www.thepeerage.com/p23642.htm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Moore, Jonathan (3 March 2010). "Obituary: Michael Foot". politics.co.uk. http://www.politics.co.uk/audio-video/video/legal-and-constitutional/legal-and-constitutional/obituary-michael-foot-$1363461.htm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Harrington, Illytd (28 December 2006). "Extraordinary life of Apostle of England". Camden New Journal. http://www.thecnj.com/review/122806/books122806_03.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Smith, Cameron (1989). Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press. pp. 161–162. ISBN 0-929091-04-3. Foot in an interview with the author in 1985
- ^ Jones, Mervyn (1995). Michael Foot. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-575-05933-7.
- ^ Jones, p. 30.
- ^ Labour's Old Romantic: A Film Portrait of Michael Foot (1997). BBC TV. ftvdb.bfi.org.uk Alison Cahn (Producer). Anne Tyerman (Series editor). Michael Cockerell (Reporter). Retrieved 5 December 2010.
- ^ Calder, Angus (13 February 1974). "The World at War". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129870/. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Howard, Anthony (5 March 2010). "Michael Foot: The last of a dying breed". Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/7373559/Michael-Foot-The-last-of-a-dying-breed.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Is Mr. Foot a Fascist?". The Times. 2 December 1975.
- ^ The Spectator Volume 237, Part 2. London: F.C. Westley. 1976. p. 12. http://books.google.co.uk/books?ei=e6ukTcCYC9S1hAewzrDfCQ.
- ^ BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/background/pastelec/ge83.shtml.
- ^ Murray, Craig (13 May 2009). "Michael Foot". craigmurray.org.uk blog. http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/michael_foot.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Sandbrook, Dominic (11 March 2007). "A lion in a donkey jacket (Review of Michael Foot: a Life by Kenneth O Morgan)". Sunday Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3663713/A-lion-in-a-donkey-jacket.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Ode to the Donkey Jacket". BBC (Today (BBC Radio 4)). http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/politics/fashion_leaders.shtml. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Voting Intention in Great Britain: 1976-present". Ipsos MORI. 21 June 2010. http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=103&view=wide. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "1983: Thatcher triumphs again". BBC News. 5 April 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/basics/4393313.stm. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
- ^ "1983: Thatcher wins landslide victory". On This Day (BBC News). 9 June 1983. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/9/newsid_2500000/2500847.stm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Simon Hoggart Footnotes to a life well lived. The Guardian, 5 March 2010
- ^ "The British Croatian Society Registered Charity No. 1086139 Info and CV's of the members". The British Croatian Society. http://www.britishcroatian.net/info/. Retrieved 15 August 2010. [dead link]
- ^ White, Michael (18 April 2007). "Michael Foot's lucky life". The Times Literary Supplement. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2637313,00.html. Retrieved 3 July 2009.
- ^ Crick, Michael (25 September 2008). "Place That Labour Face". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/michaelcrick/2008/09/place_that_labour_face.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Gordievsky, Oleg (1995). Next Stop Execution. Macmillan. pp. 187 189. ISBN 0-333-62086-0.
- ^ a b Williams, Rhys (8 July 1995). "'Sunday Times' pays Foot damages over KGB claim". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sunday-times-pays-foot-damages-over-kgb-claim-1590325.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ a b "Leading Article: Michael Foot's tainted accuser". The Independent. 20 February 1995. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-article--michael-foots-tainted-accuser-1573992.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010. [dead link]
- ^ Moore, Charles (5 March 2010). "Was Foot a national treasure or the KGB’s useful idiot?". Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/7377111/Was-Foot-a-national-treasure-or-the-KGBs-useful-idiot.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "I refuse to conk out until I have seen Argyle play in the top division." Foot, Michael (4 March 2010). "Remembering Argyle's greatest ever left-winger". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/michael-foot-remembering-argyles-greatest-ever-leftwinger-1915652.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ a b "Michael Foot". Plymouth Argyle FC. 3 March 2010. http://www.pafc.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10364~1983175,00.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Michael Foot's passion for Plymouth Argyle". BBC News. 3 March 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8547725.stm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Former UK Labour Party Leader Michael Foot dies". CBS News. http://cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/03/ap/world/main6261974.shtml. Retrieved 15 August 2010. [dead link]
- ^ a b Brooks, Richard (25 February 2007). "Michael Foot had a young black mistress". Sunday Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1434627.ece. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Henderson, Mark (4 March 2010). "Michael Foot, Labour Party Leader (obituary)". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7048130.ece. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Michael Foot (obituary)". Daily Telegraph. 3 March 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/7359721/Michael-Foot.html. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Beattie, Jason (4 April 2010). "Michael Foot was the heart and soul of Labour and a giant of the movement – even his enemies will mourn". Daily Mirror. http://www.mirror.co.uk/2010/03/04/michael-foot-was-the-heart-and-soul-of-labour-and-a-giant-of-the-movement-even-his-enemies-will-mourn-115875-22084002/. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Jones, Mervyn (3 March 2010). "Michael Foot obituary". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/03/michael-foot-obituary. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Former Labour leader Michael Foot dies". BBC News. 3 March 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8547366.stm. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ "Michael Foot dies". New Statesman. 3 March 2010. http://www.newstatesman.com/2010/03/foot-dies-aged-leader-labour. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
- ^ Siddique, Haroon (15 March 2010). "Gordon Brown leads mourners at funeral of Michael Foot". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/15/gordon-brown-funeral-michael-foot. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
Bibliography[link]
- Cato (pen name) Guilty Men, Left Book Club (1940)
- Cassius (pen name) Brendan and Beverley, Victor Gollancz (1940)
- The Pen and the Sword, MacGibbon and Kee (1957) ISBN 0-261-61989-6
- Aneurin Bevan, MacGibbon and Kee (volume 1:1962) (volume 2:1973) ISBN 0-261-61508-4
- Debts of Honour, Harper and Row (1981) ISBN 0-06-039001-8
- Another Heart and Other Pulses, Collins (1984) ISBN 978-0-00-217256-1.
- H. G.: The History of Mr Wells, Doubleday (1985) ISBN 978-1-887178-04-4
- Loyalists and Loners, Collins (1986) ISBN 978-0-00-217583-8
- Politics of Paradise, HarperCollins (1989) ISBN 0-06-039091-3
- "Introduction" in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Penguin (1967)
- '"Bevan's Message to the World"' in Geoffrey Goodman's (editor) The State of the Nation: The Political Legacy of Aneurin Bevan, Gollancz (1997)
- "Introduction" in Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, Routledge (1998)
- Dr Strangelove, I Presume, Gollancz (1999)
- & Brian Brivati (editor), The Uncollected Michael Foot, Politicos Publishing (2003) ISBN 978-1-84275-096-4
- 'Foreword' in Greg Rosen's Old Labour to New, Methuen Publishing (2005) ISBN 978-1-84275-045-2
- Isaac Foot: A West Country Boy - Apostle of England, Politicos Publishing (2006) ISBN 978-1-84275-181-7
Biographies[link]
- Hoggart, Simon; & Leigh, David. Michael Foot: a Portrait. Hodder. 1981. ISBN 0-340-27040-3
- Jones, Mervyn. Michael Foot. Gollancz. 1993. ISBN 0-575-05933-8
- Morgan, Kenneth O. Michael Foot: A Life. HarperPress (HarperCollins) 2007. ISBN 978-0-00-717826-1
External links[link]
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Michael Foot |
- Michael Foot at the Internet Movie Database
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Michael Foot
- Michael Foot at 90 Johann Hari, 24 July 2003 - In-depth biographical interview marking Foot's 90th birthday
- Michael Foot (1913-2010) Slideshow, The First Post
- Fictional obituary of Michael Foot: "what if" the Falklands Task Force had been defeated? Today in Alternate History
- The Labour History Archive and Study Centre hold Michael Foot's archive at: People's History Museum
- Michael Foot 1913-2010 New Statesman, 3 November 2008 - The last published interview with the former Labour leader, who died on 3 March 2010 at the aged of 96
| Media offices | ||
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| Preceded by Frank Owen |
Editor of the Evening Standard 1942–1943 |
Succeeded by Sydney Elliott |
| Preceded by Jon Kimche |
Editor of Tribune 1948–1952 Served alongside: Evelyn Anderson |
Succeeded by Bob Edwards |
| Preceded by Evelyn Anderson |
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| Preceded by Bob Edwards |
Editor of Tribune 1955–1960 |
Succeeded by Richard Clements |
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by Leslie Hore-Belisha |
Member of Parliament for Plymouth Devonport 1945–1955 |
Succeeded by Joan Vickers |
| Preceded by Aneurin Bevan |
Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale 1960–1992 |
Succeeded by Llew Smith |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by William Whitelaw |
Secretary of State for Employment 1974–1976 |
Succeeded by Albert Booth |
| Preceded by Edward Short |
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party 1976–1980 |
Succeeded by Denis Healey |
| Preceded by Edward Short |
Leader of the House of Commons 1976–1979 |
Succeeded by Norman St John-Stevas |
| Lord President of the Council 1976–1979 |
Succeeded by The Lord Soames |
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| Preceded by James Callaghan |
Leader of the Opposition 1980–1983 |
Succeeded by Neil Kinnock |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by James Callaghan |
Leader of the Labour Party 1980–1983 |
Succeeded by Neil Kinnock |
| Honorary titles | ||
| Preceded by Robert Edwards |
Oldest sitting member of the House of Commons 1987–1992 |
Succeeded by Edward Heath |
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| Persondata | |
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| Name | Foot, Michael |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | British politician |
| Date of birth | 23 July 1913 |
| Place of birth | Plymouth, United Kingdom |
| Date of death | 3 March 2010 |
| Place of death | Hampstead, United Kingdom |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Foot
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For other uses, see Margaret Thatcher (disambiguation).
| The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher LG OM PC FRS |
|
|---|---|
 |
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| Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | |
| In office 4 May 1979 – 28 November 1990 |
|
| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Deputy | William Whitelaw Geoffrey Howe |
| Preceded by | James Callaghan |
| Succeeded by | John Major |
| Leader of the Opposition | |
| In office 11 February 1975 – 4 May 1979 |
|
| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Prime Minister | Harold Wilson James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Edward Heath |
| Succeeded by | James Callaghan |
| Leader of the Conservative Party | |
| In office 11 February 1975 – 28 November 1990 |
|
| Preceded by | Edward Heath |
| Succeeded by | John Major |
| Secretary of State for Education and Science | |
| In office 20 June 1970 – 4 March 1974 |
|
| Prime Minister | Edward Heath |
| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Reginald Prentice |
| Member of Parliament for Finchley |
|
| In office 8 October 1959 – 9 April 1992 |
|
| Preceded by | John Crowder |
| Succeeded by | Hartley Booth |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Margaret Hilda Roberts (1925-10-13) 13 October 1925 (age 86) Grantham, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Spouse(s) | Denis Thatcher (married 1951–2003, his death) |
| Children | Carol Thatcher Mark Thatcher |
| Residence | Chester Square |
| Alma mater | Somerville College, Oxford Inns of Court |
| Profession | Chemist Lawyer |
| Religion | Church of England (Since 1951)[1] Methodism (Before 1951) |
| Signature |  |
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, née Roberts (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the longest-serving (1979–1990) British prime minister of the 20th century, and the only woman ever to have held the post. A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which later became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Originally a research chemist before becoming a barrister, Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election and became Leader of the Opposition, as well as the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became prime minister after winning the 1979 general election.
After entering 10 Downing Street, Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives to reverse what she perceived as Britain's precipitous national decline.[nb 1] Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity during her first years in office waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her re-election in 1983. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge (popularly referred to as "poll tax") was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990, after Michael Heseltine launched a challenge to her leadership.
Thatcher holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.
Contents |
Early life and education[link]
Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on 13 October 1925. Her father was Alfred Roberts, originally from Northamptonshire, and her mother was Beatrice Ethel (née Stephenson) from Lincolnshire.[3] She spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned two grocery shops.[4] She and her older sister Muriel were raised in the flat above the larger of the two, located near the railway line.[4] Her father was active in local politics and the Christian church, serving as an alderman and a Methodist local preacher,[5] and brought up his daughter as a strict Methodist.[6] He came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He was Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.[5]
Roberts attended Huntingtower Road Primary School and won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School.[7] Her school reports showed hard work and continual improvement; her extracurricular activities included the piano, field hockey, poetry recitals, swimming and walking.[8][9] She was head girl in 1942–43.[10] In her upper sixth year she applied for a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford but was initially rejected, and was offered a place only after another candidate withdrew.[11][12] She arrived at Oxford in 1943 and graduated in 1947 with Second Class Honours in the four-year Chemistry Bachelor of Science degree; in her final year she specialised in X-ray crystallography under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin.[13][14]
Roberts became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946.[15][16] She was influenced at university by political works such as Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944),[17] which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.[18]
After graduating, Roberts moved to Colchester in Essex to work as a research chemist for BX Plastics.[19] She joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association.[20] One of her Oxford friends was also a friend of the Chair of the Dartford Conservative Association in Kent, who were looking for candidates.[20] Officials of the association were so impressed by her that they asked her to apply, even though she was not on the Conservative party's approved list: she was selected in January 1951 and added to the approved list post ante.[21] At a dinner following her formal adoption as Conservative candidate for Dartford in February 1951 she met Denis Thatcher, a successful and wealthy divorced businessman, who drove her to her Essex train.[20][21] In preparation for the election Roberts moved to Dartford, where she supported herself by working as a research chemist for J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith, part of a team developing emulsifiers for ice cream.[20][22]
Early political career[link]
In the 1950 and 1951 general elections she was the Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of Dartford, where she attracted media attention as the youngest and the only female candidate.[23][24] She lost both times to Norman Dodds, but reduced the Labour majority by 6,000, and then a further 1,000.[23] (By an odd coincidence, Edward Heath was elected for the first time in the neighbouring constituency in 1950.) During the campaigns, she was supported by her parents and by Denis Thatcher, whom she married in December 1951.[23][25] Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar;[26] she qualified as a barrister in 1953 and specialised in taxation.[27] That same year her twins, Carol and Mark, were born.[28]
Member of Parliament (1959–1970)[link]
Thatcher was not a candidate in the 1955 general election as it came fairly soon after the birth of her children, although she was narrowly defeated as the candidate for the Orpington by-election, 1955.[28] Afterwards, she began looking for a safe Conservative seat, and was selected as the candidate for Finchley in April 1958 (narrowly beating Ian Montagu Fraser). She was elected as MP for the seat after a hard campaign in the 1959 election.[29] Her maiden speech was in support of her private member's bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960), requiring local authorities to hold their council meetings in public. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching.[30] She regarded Finchley's Jewish residents as "her people" and became a founding member of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley as well as a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel.[31] But she nevertheless believed that Israel had to trade land for peace, and condemned Israel's bombing of Osirak as "a grave breach of international law".[31]
In October 1961 Thatcher was promoted to the front bench as Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in Harold Macmillan's administration.[32] After the Conservatives lost the 1964 election she became spokeswoman on Housing and Land, in which position she advocated her party's policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses.[33] She moved to the Shadow Treasury team in 1966, and as Treasury spokeswoman opposed Labour's mandatory price and income controls, arguing that they would produce effects contrary to those intended and distort the economy.[33]
At the Conservative Party Conference of 1966 she criticised the high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism".[33] She argued that lower taxes served as an incentive to hard work.[33] Thatcher was one of the few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality[34] and voted in favour of David Steel's bill to legalise abortion,[1][35] as well as a ban on hare coursing.[36][37] She supported the retention of capital punishment[38] and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws.[39][40]
In 1967 she was selected by the United States Embassy in London to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program (then called the Foreign Leader Program), a professional exchange programme that gave her the opportunity to spend about six weeks visiting various US cities and political figures as well as institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.[41] Thatcher joined the Shadow Cabinet later that year as Fuel spokesman. Shortly before the 1970 general election, she was promoted to Shadow Transport spokesman and later to Education.[42]
Education Secretary (1970–1974)[link]
The Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was subsequently appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science. During her first months in office she attracted public attention as a result of the administration's attempts to cut spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools,[43] and imposed public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven.[44] She held that few children would suffer if schools were charged for milk, but she agreed to provide younger children with a third of a pint daily, for nutritional purposes.[44] Her decision provoked a storm of protest from the Labour party and the press,[45] leading to the moniker "Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher".[44] Thatcher wrote in her autobiography: "I learned a valuable lesson [from the experience]. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit."[45][46]
Thatcher's term of office was marked by proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools and to adopt comprehensive secondary education. Although she was committed to a tiered secondary modern-grammar school system of education, and determined to preserve grammar schools,[43] during her tenure as Education Secretary she turned down only 326 of 3,612 proposals for schools to become comprehensives; the proportion of pupils attending comprehensive schools consequently rose from 32 per cent to 62 per cent.[47]
Leader of the Opposition (1975–1979)[link]
The Heath government continued to experience difficulties with oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973, and lost the February 1974 general election.[45] Labour formed a minority government, and went on to win a narrow majority in the October 1974 general election. Heath's leadership of the Conservative Party looked increasingly in doubt. Thatcher was not initially the obvious replacement, but she eventually became the main challenger, promising a fresh start.[48] Her main support came from the Conservative 1922 Committee.[48] She defeated Heath on the first ballot and he resigned the leadership.[49] In the second ballot she defeated Heath's preferred successor, William Whitelaw, and became party leader on 11 February 1975;[50] she appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the end of his life, for what he and many of his supporters perceived as her disloyalty in standing against him.[51]
Thatcher began to attend lunches regularly at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank founded by the poultry magnate Antony Fisher, a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek; she had been visiting the IEA and reading its publications since the early 1960s. There she was influenced by the ideas of Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, and she became the face of the ideological movement opposing the welfare state Keynesian economics they believed was weakening Britain. The institute's pamphlets proposed less government, lower taxes, and more freedom for business and consumers.[52][page needed]
The television critic Clive James, writing in The Observer during the voting for the leadership, compared her voice of 1973 to a cat sliding down a blackboard.[nb 2] Thatcher had already begun to work on her presentation on the advice of Gordon Reece, a former television producer. By chance Reece met the actor Laurence Olivier, who arranged lessons with the National Theatre's voice coach.[53][54][55] Thatcher succeeded in completely suppressing her Lincolnshire dialect except when under stress, notably after provocation from Denis Healey in the House of Commons in April 1983, when she accused the Labour front bench of being frit.[56][nb 3]
On 19 January 1976 Thatcher made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union; in response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) called her the "Iron Lady":[57]
The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.[57]
In mid-1978, the economy began to improve and opinion polls showed Labour in the lead, with a general election being expected later that year and a Labour win a serious possibility. Prime Minister James Callaghan surprised many by announcing on 7 September that there would be no general election that year and he would wait until 1979 before going to the polls. Thatcher reacted to this by branding the Labour government as "chickens", and Liberal Party leader David Steel joined in, criticising Labour for "running scared".[58]
The Labour government then faced fresh public unease about the direction of the country and a damaging series of strikes during the winter of 1978–79, dubbed the "Winter of Discontent". The Conservatives attacked the Labour government's unemployment record, using advertising with the slogan Labour Isn't Working. A general election was called after James Callaghan's government lost a motion of no confidence in early 1979. The Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons, and Margaret Thatcher became the UK's first female Prime Minister.
Prime Minister (1979–1990)[link]
Main article: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said, in a paraphrase of the "Prayer of Saint Francis":
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
Domestic affairs[link]
Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister at a time of increased racial tension in Britain. Commenting on the local elections of May 1977, The Economist noted "The Tory tide swamped the smaller parties. That specifically includes the National Front, which suffered a clear decline from last year".[59][60] Her standing in the polls rose by 11 percent after a January 1978 interview for World in Action in which she said "the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in."; and "in many ways [minorities] add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened."[61][62] In the 1979 General Election, the Conservatives attracted voters from the National Front, whose support almost collapsed.[63][64] In a meeting in July 1979 with Lord Carrington (the Foreign Secretary) and William Whitelaw (Home Secretary) she objected to the number of Asian immigrants,[65] in the context of limiting the number of Vietnamese boat people allowed to settle in the UK to fewer than 10,000.
As Prime Minister, Thatcher met weekly with Queen Elizabeth II to discuss government business, and their relationship came under close scrutiny.[66][67] In July 1986 the Sunday Times reported claims attributed to the Queen's advisers of a "rift" between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street "over a wide range of domestic and international issues".[68][69] The Palace issued an official denial, heading off speculation about a possible constitutional crisis.[69] After Thatcher's retirement a senior Palace source again dismissed as "nonsense" the "stereotyped idea" that she had not got along with the Queen, or that they had fallen out over Thatcherite policies.[70] Thatcher later wrote: "I always found the Queen's attitude towards the work of the Government absolutely correct ... stories of clashes between 'two powerful women' were just too good not to make up."[71]
During her time in office Thatcher practised great frugality in her official residence, including insisting on paying for her own ironing-board.[72]
Economy and taxation[link]
Thatcher's economic policy was influenced by monetarist thinking and economists such as Milton Friedman.[73] Together with Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe, she lowered direct taxes on income and increased indirect taxes.[74] She increased interest rates to slow the growth of the money supply and thereby lower inflation,[73] introduced cash limits on public spending, and reduced expenditure on social services such as education and housing.[74] Her cuts in higher education spending resulted in her being the first Oxford-educated post-war Prime Minister not to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford, after a 738 to 319 vote of the governing assembly and a student petition.[75] Her new centrally-funded City Technology Colleges did not enjoy much success, and the Funding Agency for Schools was set up to control expenditure by opening and closing schools; the Social Market Foundation, a right-wing think tank, described it as having "an extraordinary range of dictatorial powers".[76]
| GDP and public spending by functional classification |
% change in real terms 1979/80 to 1989/90[77] |
|---|---|
| GDP | +23.3 |
| Total government spending | +12.9 |
| Law and order | +53.3 |
| Employment and training | +33.3 |
| Health | +31.8 |
| Social security | +31.8 |
| Transport | −5.8 |
| Trade and industry | −38.2 |
| Housing | −67.0 |
| Defence | −3.3[78] |
Some Heathite Conservatives in the Cabinet, the so-called "wets", expressed doubt over Thatcher's policies.[79] The 1981 riots in England resulted in the British media discussing the need for a policy U-turn. At the 1980 Conservative Party conference, Thatcher addressed the issue directly, with a speech written by the playwright Ronald Millar[80] that included the lines: "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!"[79]
Thatcher's job approval rating fell to 23% by December 1980, lower than recorded for any previous Prime Minister.[81] As the recession of the early 1980s deepened she increased taxes,[82] despite concerns expressed in a statement signed by 364 leading economists issued towards the end of March 1981.[83]
By 1982 the UK began to experience signs of economic recovery;[84] inflation was down to 8.6% from a high of 18%, but unemployment was over 3 million for the first time since the 1930s.[85] By 1983 overall economic growth was stronger and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970, although manufacturing output had dropped by 30% since 1978[86] and unemployment remained high, peaking at 3.3 million in 1984.[87]
By 1987, unemployment was falling, the economy was stable and strong, and inflation was low. Opinion polls showed a comfortable Conservative lead, and local council election results had also been successful, prompting Thatcher to call a general election for 11 June that year, despite the deadline for an election still being 12 months away. The election saw Thatcher re-elected for a third successive term.[88]
Throughout the 1980s revenue from the 90% tax on North Sea oil extraction was used as a short-term funding source to balance the economy and pay the costs of reform.[89]
Thatcher reformed local government taxes by replacing domestic rates—a tax based on the nominal rental value of a home—with the Community Charge (or poll tax) in which the same amount was charged to each adult resident.[90] The new tax was introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales the following year,[91] and proved to be among the most unpopular policies of her premiership.[90] Public disquiet culminated in a 70,000-strong demonstration in London on 31 March 1990; the demonstration around Trafalgar Square deteriorated into the Poll Tax Riots, leaving 113 people injured and 340 under arrest.[92] The Community Charge was abolished by her successor, John Major.[92]
Industrial relations[link]
Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions, whose leadership she accused of undermining parliamentary democracy and economic performance through strike action.[93] Several unions launched strikes in response to legislation introduced to curb their power, but resistance eventually collapsed.[94] Only 39% of union members voted for Labour in the 1983 general election.[95] According to the BBC, Thatcher "managed to destroy the power of the trade unions for almost a generation".[96]
The miners' strike was the biggest confrontation between the unions and the Thatcher government. In March 1984 the National Coal Board (NCB) proposed to close 20 of the 174 state-owned mines and cut 20,000 jobs out of 187,000.[97][98][99] Two-thirds of the country's miners, led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) under Arthur Scargill, downed tools in protest.[97][100][101] Thatcher refused to meet the union's demands and compared the miners' dispute to the Falklands conflict two years earlier, declaring in a speech in 1984: "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty."[102] After a year out on strike, in March 1985, the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The cost to the economy was estimated to be at least £1.5 billion, and the strike was blamed for much of the pound's fall against the US dollar.[103] The government closed 25 unprofitable coal mines in 1985, and by 1992 a total of 97 had been closed;[99] those that remained were privatised in 1994.[104] The eventual closure of 150 coal mines, not all of which were losing money, resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and devastated entire communities.[99][105] Miners had helped bring down the Heath government, and Thatcher was determined to succeed where he had failed. Her strategy of preparing fuel stocks, appointing a union-busting NCB leader in Ian MacGregor, and ensuring police were adequately trained and equipped with riot gear, contributed to her victory.[106]
The number of stoppages across the UK peaked at 4583 in 1979, when more than 29 million working days were lost. In 1984, the year of the miners' strike, there were 1221, resulting in the loss of more than 27 million working days. Stoppages then fell steadily throughout the rest of Thatcher's premiership; in 1990 there were 630 and fewer than 2 million working days lost, and they continued to fall thereafter.[107] Trade union membership also fell, from 13.5 million in 1979 to fewer than 10 million by the time Thatcher left office in 1990.[108]
Privatisation[link]
The policy of privatisation has been called "a crucial ingredient of Thatcherism".[109] After the 1983 election the sale of state utilities accelerated;[110] more than £29 billion was raised from the sale of nationalised industries, and another £18 billion from the sale of council houses.[111]
The process of privatisation, especially the preparation of nationalised industries for privatisation, was associated with marked improvements in performance, particularly in terms of labour productivity.[112] Some of the privatised industries including gas, water, and electricity, were natural monopolies for which privatisation involved little increase in competition. The privatised industries that demonstrated improvement often did so while still under state ownership. British Steel, for instance, made great gains in profitability while still a nationalised industry under the government-appointed chairmanship of Ian MacGregor, who faced down trade-union opposition to close plants and reduce the workforce by half.[113] Regulation was also significantly expanded to compensate for the loss of direct government control, with the foundation of regulatory bodies like Ofgas, Oftel and the National Rivers Authority.[114] There was no clear pattern to the degree of competition, regulation, and performance among the privatised industries;[112] in most cases privatisation benefitted consumers in terms of lower prices and improved efficiency, but the results overall were "mixed".[115]
Thatcher always resisted rail privatisation, and was said to have told Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley "Railway privatisation will be the Waterloo of this government. Please never mention the railways to me again." Shortly before her resignation, she accepted the arguments for privatising British Rail, which her successor John Major implemented in 1994.[116] The Economist later considered the move to have been "a disaster".[115]
The privatisation of public assets was combined with financial deregulation in an attempt to fuel economic growth. Geoffrey Howe abolished Britain's exchange controls in 1979, allowing more capital to be invested in foreign markets, and the Big Bang of 1986 removed many restrictions on the London Stock Exchange. The Thatcher government encouraged growth in the finance and service sectors to compensate for Britain's ailing manufacturing industry.
Northern Ireland[link]
In 1980 and 1981, Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison carried out hunger strikes in an effort to regain the status of political prisoners that had been removed in 1976 under the preceding Labour government.[117] Bobby Sands began the 1981 strike, saying that he would fast until death unless prison inmates won concessions over their living conditions.[117] Thatcher refused to countenance a return to political status for the prisoners, declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not political",[117] but nevertheless the UK government privately contacted republican leaders in a bid to bring the hunger strikes to an end.[118] After the deaths of Sands and nine others, some rights were restored to paramilitary prisoners, but not official recognition of their political status.[119] Violence in Northern Ireland escalated significantly during the hunger strikes; in 1982 Sinn Féin politician Danny Morrison described Thatcher as "the biggest bastard we have ever known".[120]
Thatcher narrowly escaped injury in a IRA assassination attempt at a Brighton hotel early in the morning on 12 October 1984.[121] Five people were killed, including the wife of Cabinet Minister John Wakeham. Thatcher was staying at the hotel to attend the Conservative Party Conference, which she insisted should open as scheduled the following day.[121] She delivered her speech as planned,[122] a move that was widely supported across the political spectrum and enhanced her popularity with the public.[123]
On 6 November 1981 Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald had established the Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council, a forum for meetings between the two governments.[119] On 15 November 1985, Thatcher and FitzGerald signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first time a British government had given the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland. In protest the Ulster Says No movement attracted 100,000 to a rally in Belfast,[124] Ian Gow resigned as Minister of State in the HM Treasury,[125][126] and all fifteen Unionist MPs resigned their parliamentary seats; only one was not returned in the subsequent by-elections on 23 January 1986.[127]
Foreign affairs[link]
Thatcher took office in the penultimate decade of the Cold War and became closely aligned with the policies of United States President Ronald Reagan, based on their shared distrust of Communism,[94] although she strongly opposed Reagan's October 1983 invasion of Grenada.[128] During her first year as Prime Minister she supported NATO's decision to deploy US nuclear cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe,[94] and permitted the US to station more than 160 cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common, starting on 14 November 1983 and triggering mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[94] She bought the Trident nuclear missile submarine system from the US to replace Polaris, tripling the UK's nuclear forces[129] at an eventual cost of more than £12 billion (at 1996–97 prices).[130] Thatcher's preference for defence ties with the US was demonstrated in the Westland affair of January 1986, when she acted with colleagues to allow the struggling helicopter manufacturer Westland to refuse a takeover offer from the Italian firm Agusta in favour of the management's preferred option, a link with Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation. The UK Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, who had supported the Agusta deal, resigned in protest.[131]
On 2 April 1982 the ruling military junta in Argentina ordered the invasion of the British-controlled Falkland Islands and South Georgia, triggering the Falklands War.[132] The subsequent crisis was "a defining moment of her [Thatcher's] premiership".[133] At the suggestion of Harold Macmillan and Robert Armstrong,[133] she set up and chaired a small War Cabinet (formally called ODSA, Overseas and Defence committee, South Atlantic) to take charge of the conduct of the war,[134] which by 5–6 April had authorised and dispatched a naval task force to retake the islands.[135] Argentina surrendered on 14 June and the operation was hailed a success, notwithstanding the deaths of 255 British servicemen and 3 Falkland Islanders. Argentinian deaths totalled 649, half of them after the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror torpedoed and sank the cruiser ARA General Belgrano on 2 May.[136] Thatcher was criticised for the neglect of the Falklands' defence that led to the war, and notably by Tam Dalyell in parliament for the decision to sink the General Belgrano, but overall she was considered a highly capable and committed war leader.[137] The "Falklands factor", an economic recovery beginning early in 1982, and a bitterly divided Labour opposition contributed to Thatcher's second election victory in 1983.[138] Thatcher often referred after the war to the "Falklands Spirit"; Hastings and Jenkins (1983) suggested that this reflected her preference for the streamlined decision-making of her War Cabinet over the painstaking deal-making of peace-time cabinet government.[139]
Although saying that she was against apartheid, Thatcher stood against the sanctions imposed on South Africa by the Commonwealth and the EC.[140] She attempted to preserve trade with South Africa while persuading the regime there to abandon apartheid. This included "[c]asting herself as President Botha's candid friend", and inviting him to visit the UK in June 1984, in spite of the "inevitable demonstrations" against his regime.[141] Thatcher, on the other hand, was no friend of the African National Congress (ANC), which Geoffrey Howe recalls her dismissing as late as October 1987 as "a typical terrorist organisation".[142]
The Thatcher government supported the Khmer Rouge keeping their seat in the UN after they were ousted from power in Cambodia by the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Although denying it at the time they also sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge alliance to fight against the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea government.[143][144][145]
Thatcher's antipathy towards European integration became more pronounced during her premiership, particularly after her third election victory in 1987. During a 1988 speech in Bruges she outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community (EC), forerunner of the European Union, for a federal structure and increased centralisation of decision making.[146] Thatcher and her party had supported British membership of the EC in the 1975 national referendum,[147] but she believed that the role of the organisation should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that the EC's approach was at odds with her views on smaller government and deregulation;[148] in 1988, she remarked, "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels".[148] Thatcher was firmly opposed to the UK's membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a precursor to European monetary union, believing that it would constrain the British economy,[149] despite the urging of her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe,[150] but she was persuaded by John Major to join in October 1990, at what proved to be too high a rate.[151]
In April 1986, Thatcher permitted US F-111s to use Royal Air Force bases for the bombing of Libya in retaliation for the alleged Libyan bombing of a Berlin discothèque,[152] citing the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter.[153][nb 4] Polls suggested that less than one in three British citizens approved of Thatcher's decision.[155] She was in the US on a state visit when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait in August 1990.[156] During her talks with US President George H. W. Bush, who had succeeded Reagan in 1989, she recommended intervention,[156] and put pressure on Bush to deploy troops in the Middle East to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.[157] Bush was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, prompting Thatcher to remark to him during a telephone conversation that "This was no time to go wobbly!"[158] Thatcher's government provided military forces to the international coalition in the build-up to the Gulf War, but she had resigned by the time hostilities began on 17 January 1991.
Thatcher was one of the first Western leaders to respond warmly to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Following Reagan–Gorbachev summit meetings and reforms enacted by Gorbachev in the USSR, she declared in November 1988 that "We're not in a Cold War now", but rather in a "new relationship much wider than the Cold War ever was".[159] She went on a state visit to the Soviet Union in 1984, and met with Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers.[160] Thatcher was initially opposed to German reunification, telling Gorbachev that it "would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security". She expressed concern that a united Germany would align itself more closely with the Soviet Union and move away from NATO.[161] In contrast she was an advocate of Croatian and Slovenian independence.[162] In a 1991 interview for Croatian Radiotelevision, Thatcher commented on the Yugoslav Wars; she was critical of Western governments for not recognising the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia as independent states and supplying them with arms after the Serbian-led Yugoslav Army attacked.[163]
Challenges to leadership and resignation[link]
Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by the little-known backbench MP Sir Anthony Meyer in the 1989 leadership election.[164] Of the 374 Conservative MPs eligible to vote 314 voted for Thatcher and 33 for Meyer.[164] Her supporters in the party viewed the result as a success, and rejected suggestions that there was discontent within the party.[164]
During her premiership Thatcher had the second-lowest average approval rating, at 40 percent, of any post-war Prime Minister. Polls consistently showed that she was less popular than her party.[165] A self-described conviction politician, Thatcher always insisted that she did not care about her poll ratings, pointing instead to her unbeaten election record.[166]
Opinion polls in September 1990 reported that Labour had established a 14% lead over the Conservatives,[167] and by November the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 18 months.[165] These ratings, together with Thatcher's combative personality and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, contributed to discontent within the Conservative party.[168]
On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher's original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European single currency.[167][169] In his resignation speech on 13 November, Howe commented on Thatcher's European stance: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find the moment that the first balls are bowled that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain."[170] His resignation was fatal to Thatcher's premiership.[171]
The next day, Michael Heseltine mounted a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party.[172] Opinion polls had indicated that he would give the Conservatives a national lead over Labour.[173] Although Thatcher won the first ballot, Heseltine attracted sufficient support (152 votes) to force a second ballot.[174] Thatcher initially stated that she intended to "fight on and fight to win" the second ballot, but consultation with her Cabinet persuaded her to withdraw.[168][174][175] After seeing the Queen, calling other world leaders, and making one final Commons speech, she left Downing Street in tears. She regarded her ousting as a betrayal.[176]
Thatcher was replaced as Prime Minister and party leader by her Chancellor John Major, who oversaw an upturn in Conservative support in the 17 months leading up to the 1992 general election and led the Conservatives to their fourth successive victory on 9 April 1992.[177] Thatcher favoured Major over Heseltine in the leadership contest, but her support for him weakened in later years.[178]
Later years[link]
Thatcher returned to the backbenches as MP for Finchley for two years after leaving the premiership.[179] She retired from the House at the 1992 election, aged 66, saying that leaving the Commons would allow her more freedom to speak her mind.[180]
Post-Commons[link]
After leaving the House of Commons, Thatcher became the first former Prime Minister to set up a foundation; it closed down in 2005 because of financial difficulties.[181] She wrote two volumes of memoirs, The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995).
In July 1992, Thatcher was hired by the tobacco company Philip Morris as a "geopolitical consultant" for $250,000 per year and an annual contribution of $250,000 to her foundation.[182] She also earned $50,000 for each speech she delivered.[183]
In August 1992, Thatcher called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Goražde and Sarajevo to end ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War. She compared the situation in Bosnia to "the worst excesses of the Nazis", and warned that there could be a "holocaust".[184] She made a series of speeches in the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty,[180] describing it as "a treaty too far" and stated "I could never have signed this treaty".[185] She cited A. V. Dicey when stating that as all three main parties were in favour of revisiting the treaty, the people should have their say.[186]
Thatcher was honorary Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Virginia (1993–2000)[187] and also of the University of Buckingham (1992–1999), the UK's first private university, which she had opened in 1975.[188]
After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher praised Blair in an interview as "probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved."[189]
In 1998, Thatcher called for the release of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet when Spain had him arrested and sought to try him for human rights violations, citing the help he gave Britain during the Falklands War.[190] In 1999, she visited him while he was under house arrest near London.[191] Pinochet was released in March 2000 on medical grounds by the Home Secretary Jack Straw, without facing trial.[192]
In the 2001 general election Thatcher supported the Conservative general election campaign, but did not endorse Iain Duncan Smith as she had done for John Major and William Hague. In the Conservative leadership election shortly after, she supported Smith over Kenneth Clarke.[193]
In March 2002, Thatcher's book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, dedicated to Ronald Reagan, was released. In it, she claimed there would be no peace in the Middle East until Saddam Hussein was toppled, that Israel must trade land for peace, and that the European Union (EU) was "fundamentally unreformable", "a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure". She argued that Britain should renegotiate its terms of membership or else leave the EU and join the North American Free Trade Area. The book was serialised in The Times on 18 March.
Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and was advised by her doctors not to engage in any more public speaking.[194] On 23 March she announced that on the advice of her doctors she would cancel all planned speaking engagements and accept no more.[195]
Since 2003[link]
Sir Denis Thatcher died on 26 June 2003 and was cremated on 3 July.[196] She had paid tribute to him in The Downing Street Years, writing "Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend".[197]
On 11 June 2004, Thatcher attended the state funeral service for Ronald Reagan.[198] She delivered her eulogy via videotape; in view of her health, the message had been pre-recorded several months earlier.[199] Thatcher then flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for the president at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.[200]
Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park, London, on 13 October 2005; guests included the Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra and Tony Blair.[201] Geoffrey Howe, by then Lord Howe of Aberavon, was also present, and said of his former leader: "Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible."[202]
In 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. She was a guest of Vice President Dick Cheney, and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit.[203]
In February 2007, Thatcher became the first living UK Prime Minister to be honoured with a statue in the Houses of Parliament. The bronze statue stands opposite that of her political hero, Sir Winston Churchill,[204] and was unveiled on 21 February 2007 with Thatcher in attendance; she made a rare and brief speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, responding: "I might have preferred iron – but bronze will do ... It won't rust."[204] The statue shows her addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched.[205]
She is a public supporter of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism and the resulting Prague Process, and sent a public letter of support to its preceding conference.[206]
After collapsing at a House of Lords dinner, Thatcher was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital in central London on 7 March 2008 for tests.[207] Her daughter Carol has recounted how she was first struck by her mother's dementia when she muddled the Falklands conflict with the Yugoslav wars; she has also recalled the pain of needing to tell her mother repeatedly that Denis Thatcher was dead.[208][209]
Thatcher returned to 10 Downing Street in late November 2009 for the unveiling of an official portrait by the artist Richard Stone,[210] an unusual honour for a living ex-Prime Minister.[211] Stone had previously painted portraits of the Queen and the Queen Mother.[210]
At the Conservative Party conference in 2010, the new Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he would invite Thatcher back to 10 Downing Street on her 85th birthday for a party to be attended by past and present ministers. She pulled out of the celebration because of flu.[212][213] She was invited to the Royal Wedding on 29 April 2011 but did not attend, reportedly due to ill health.[214]
On 4 July 2011, Thatcher was to attend a ceremony for the unveiling of a 10-foot statue to former American President Ronald Reagan, outside the American Embassy but was unable to attend due to frail health.[215] On 31 July 2011 it was announced that the former prime minister's office in the House of Lords had been closed down.[216] Earlier in July 2011, Thatcher had been named the most competent British Prime Minister of the past 30 years in an Ipsos MORI poll.[217]
Legacy[link]
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Thatcher defined her own political philosophy, in a major and controversial break with One Nation Conservatives like her predecessor Edward Heath,[218] in her statement to Douglas Keay, published in Woman's Own magazine in September 1987:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.[219]
To her supporters, Margaret Thatcher remains a figure who revitalised Britain's economy, curbed the trade unions, and re-established the nation as a world power.[220] She oversaw an increase from 7% to 25% of adults owning shares, and more than a million families bought their council houses, giving an increase from 55% to 67% in owner-occupiers. Total personal wealth rose by 80%.[221]
Thatcher's premiership was also marked by high unemployment and social unrest,[220] and many critics fault her economic policies for the unemployment level; many of the areas affected by high unemployment as a result of her monetarist economic policies have still not fully recovered and are blighted by social problems such as drug abuse and family breakdown.[222] Speaking in Scotland in April 2009, before the 30th anniversary of her election as Prime Minister, Thatcher insisted she had no regrets and was right to introduce the poll tax, and to withdraw subsidies from "outdated industries, whose markets were in terminal decline", subsidies that created "the culture of dependency, which had done such damage to Britain".[223] Political economist Susan Strange called the new financial growth model "casino capitalism", reflecting her view that speculation and financial trading were becoming more important to the economy than industry.[224]
Critics have regretted Thatcher's influence in the abandonment of full employment, poverty reduction and a consensual civility as bedrock policy objectives. She has been criticised as being divisive[225] and for promoting greed and selfishness.[220] Many recent biographers have been critical of aspects of the Thatcher years and Michael White, writing in New Statesman in February 2009, challenged the view that her reforms had brought a net benefit.[226] Despite being Britain's first woman Prime Minister, some critics contend Thatcher did "little to advance the political cause of women",[227] either within her party or the government, and some British feminists regarded her as "an enemy".[228] Her stance on immigration was perceived as part of a rising racist public discourse, which Professor Martin Barker has called "new racism".[229]
Influenced at the outset by Keith Joseph,[230] the term "Thatcherism" came to refer to her policies as well as aspects of her ethical outlook and personal style, including moral absolutism, nationalism, interest in the individual, and an uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.[nb 5] The nickname "Iron Lady", originally given to her by the Soviets, became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.[231][232][233]
In 2011, Labour leader Ed Miliband praised some of Thatcher's key policies, stating: "Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 per cent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots. These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time."[234]
Thatcher's tenure of 11 years and 209 days as Prime Minister was the longest since Lord Salisbury (13 years and 252 days in three spells starting in 1885), and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool (14 years and 305 days starting in 1812).[235][236][237]
Honours[link]
Thatcher became a Privy Councillor (PC) upon becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1970.[238] She was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) (an order within the personal gift of the Queen) within two weeks of leaving office. Denis Thatcher was made a Baronet at the same time.[239] She became a peer in the House of Lords in 1992 with a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire.[180][240] She was appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter, the UK's highest order of chivalry, in 1995.[241]
She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983,[22] and was the first woman entitled to full membership rights as an honorary member of the Carlton Club on becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1975.[242]
In the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher Day has been marked every 10 January since 1992,[243] commemorating her visit in 1983.[244][245] Thatcher Drive in Stanley is named for her, as is Thatcher Peninsula in South Georgia, where the task force troops first set foot on the Falklands.[243]
Thatcher has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour awarded by the US.[246] She is a patron of The Heritage Foundation,[247] which established the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in 2005.[248] Speaking of Heritage president Ed Feulner, at the first Clare Booth Luce lecture in September 1993, Thatcher said: "You didn't just advise President Reagan on what he should do; you told him how he could do it. And as a practising politician I can testify that that is the only advice worth having."[249]
Other awards include Dame Grand Cross of the Croatian Grand Order of King Dmitar Zvonimir.[250]
Media depictions[link]
Main article: Cultural depictions of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher has been depicted in many television programmes, documentaries, films and plays. She was played by Patricia Hodge in Ian Curteis's long unproduced The Falklands Play (2002) and by Andrea Riseborough in the TV film The Long Walk to Finchley (2008). She is the titular character in two films, portrayed by Lindsay Duncan in Margaret (2009) and by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady (2011),[251] in which she is depicted as having Alzheimer's disease.[252]
Thatcher was lampooned by satirist John Wells in several media. Wells collaborated with Richard Ingrams on the spoof "Dear Bill" letters which ran as a column in Private Eye magazine, were published in book form, and were then adapted into a West End stage revue as Anyone for Denis?, starring Wells as Denis Thatcher. The stage show was followed by a 1982 TV special directed by Dick Clement.[253] In 1979, Wells was commissioned by comedy producer Martin Lewis to write and perform on a comedy record album titled Iron Lady: The Coming Of The Leader on which Thatcher was portrayed by comedienne and noted Thatcher impersonator Janet Brown. The album consisted of skits and songs satirising Thatcher's rise to power.
Spitting Image, a satirical British TV show, once portrayed Thatcher as a bullying tyrant, wearing trousers, and ridiculing her own ministers.[254]
Protest songs[link]
Thatcher was the subject or the inspiration for several protest songs. Paul Weller was a founding member of Red Wedge collective, which unsuccessfully sought to oust Thatcher with the help of music. In 1987, they organised a comedy tour with British comedians Lenny Henry, Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane, Harry Enfield and others.[255]
Styles and titles[link]
- Miss Margaret Roberts (1925–1951)
- Mrs. Margaret Thatcher (1951–1959)
- Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, MP (1959–1970)
- The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP (1970–1990)
- The Rt Hon. Lady Thatcher, OM, MP (1990–1992)
- The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, OM, PC (1992–1995)
- The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (1995–present)
References[link]
Notes[link]
- ^ In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, Thatcher wrote of "a feeling of helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind".[2]
- ^ "The hang-up has always been the voice. Not the timbre so much as, well, the tone—the condescending explanatory whine which treats the squirming interlocutor as an eight-year-old child with personality deficiencies. It has been fascinating, recently, to watch her striving to eliminate this. BBC2 News Extra on Tuesday night rolled a clip from May 1973 demonstrating the Thatcher sneer at full pitch. (She was saying that she wouldn't dream of seeking the leadership.) She sounded like a cat sliding down a blackboard." James, Clive (9 February 1975). The Observer (London). Anthologised in James 1977, pp. 119–120.
- ^ Amid uproar from both sides of the house, Mrs Thatcher shouted: "So you are afraid of an election are you? Afraid, Afraid, Afraid. Frightened, frit – couldn't take it. Couldn't stand it." "PM taunts Labour over early election". The Guardian. 20 April 1983.
- ^ Speaking to the House of Commons, Thatcher stated that "the United States has more than 330,000 members of her forces in Europe to defend our liberty. Because they are here, they are subject to terrorist attack. It is inconceivable that they should be refused the right to use American aircraft and American pilots in the inherent right of self-defence, to defend their own people."[154]
- ^ Nigel Lawson listed the Thatcherite ideals as: "Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values' (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism." Lawson 1992, p. 64
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- ^ "Statue of Margaret Thatcher Unveiled". Associated Press. 21 February 2007. http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/2/21/195931.shtml?s=ic. Retrieved 1 November 2008.
- ^ "Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism — Press Release". Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. 9 June 2008. Archived from the original on 10 May 2011. http://www.webcitation.org/5yf4HFF6d. Retrieved 10 May 2011.
- ^ Walters, Simon (8 March 2008). "Immaculate as ever, Baroness Thatcher leaves hospital after collapsing over the fruit jelly". Daily Mail (London). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-528755/Immaculate-Baroness-Thatcher-leaves-hospital-collapsing-fruit-jelly.html. Retrieved 9 November 2008.
- ^ Carol Thatcher (20 Oct 2008). "I always thought of Mum as being 100% cast-iron damage-proof". Dail Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1048540/Carol-Thatcher-I-thought-Mum-100-cast-iron-damage-proof.html. Retrieved 5 Feb 2012.
- ^ Satter, Raphael G (25 August 2008). "Book Recounts Margaret Thatcher's Decline". Associated Press. CBS. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/25/health/main4380977.shtml. Retrieved 20 November 2008.
- ^ a b "Margaret Thatcher returns to Downing Street". Daily Telegraph (London). 23 November 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/margaret-thatcher/6636644/Margaret-Thatcher-returns-to-Downing-Street.html. Retrieved 23 November 2009.
- ^ Walters, Simon; Owen, Glen (23 November 2009). "Brown bans cameras from No.10 portrait unveiling ...". Daily Mail (London). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229921/Brown-bans-cameras-No10-portrait-unveiling--After-Thatcher-win-votes.html. Retrieved 23 November 2009.
- ^ "Lady Thatcher pulls out of 85th birthday party at No 10 for health reasons". The Guardian. Press Association (London: Guardian News and Media). 14 October 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/14/lady-thatcher-pulls-out-85th-birthday-party-no-10. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
- ^ "Baroness Thatcher admitted to hospital". BBC News. 19 October 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11579988. Retrieved 19 October 2010.
- ^ Kirkup, James (29 April 2011). "Royal Wedding Invite". Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8482346/Royal-wedding-Tony-Blair-not-offended-by-lack-of-invite.html. Retrieved 29 October 2011.
- ^ "Ronald Reagan statue unveiled at US Embassy in London". BBC News. 4 July 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14009137.
- ^ Walker, Tim (30 July 2011). "Baroness Thatcher's office is closed". The Telegraph (London: Telegraph Media Group). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8671195/Baroness-Thatchers-office-is-closed.html. Retrieved 21 August 2011.
- ^ Stacey, Kiran (3 July 2011). "Thatcher heads poll of most competent PMs". financial times.com. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d4e23a0c-a3f9-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1R5B1AzaY. Retrieved 31 July 2011.
- ^ Campbell, John (2008). Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady. Random House. pp. 530–532. ISBN 0-09-951677-2.
- ^ "Interview for Woman's Own ("no such thing as society") with journalist Douglas Keay". Margaret Thatcher Foundation. 23 September 1987. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689. Retrieved 10 April 2007.
- ^ a b c "Evaluating Thatcher's legacy". BBC News. 4 May 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3681973.stm. Retrieved 1 November 2008.
- ^ Marr 2007, p. 430
- ^ Richards 2004, p. 63
- ^ Allardyce, Jason (26 April 2009). "Thatcher: I did right by Scots; Thatcher: I regret nothing". Sunday Times: p. 1.
- ^ Gamble 2009, p. 16
- ^ "Who has been UK's greatest post-war PM?". BBC News. 16 September 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7593554.stm.
- ^ "Who was it who first removed the seat belts and airbags from the safe-but-boring Volvo that the West built after 1945? 'Her freer, more promiscuous version of capitalism' in Hugo Young's phrase is reaping a darker harvest." Michael White "The Making of Maggie" New Statesman 26 February 2009
- ^ Evans 2004, p. 25
- ^ Burns 2009, p. 234
- ^ Chin 2009, p. 92
- ^ Marr 2007, p. 358
- ^ "Margaret Thatcher: Britain's Iron Lady – CBC Archives". Archives.cbc.ca. http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/international_politics/clips/2029/. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
- ^ "Thatcher Quits Public Life, Citing Health". The New York Times. 23 March 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/world/thatcher-quits-public-life-citing-health.html. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
- ^ 14 June 2009 2:30 am (14 June 2009). "Margaret Thatcher rushed to hospital". Perth Now. http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/world/margaret-thatcher-rushed-to-hospital/story-e6frg1p3-1225734493486. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
- ^ "Labour Party Conference: Ed Miliband's speech in full". Daily Telegraph (London: Telegraph Media Group). 27 September 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/8791870/Labour-Party-Conference-Ed-Milibands-speech-in-full.html. Retrieved 10 March 2012.
- ^ HM Government. "Margaret Thatcher". Number10.gov.uk. http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/prime-ministers-in-history/margaret-thatcher. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
- ^ HM Government. "Marquess of Salisbury". Number10.gov.uk. http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/prime-ministers-in-history/marquess-of-salisbury. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
- ^ HM Government. "Earl of Liverpool". Number10.gov.uk. http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/prime-ministers-in-history/earl-of-liverpool. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
- ^ Gay, O.; Rees, A. (2005). "The Privy Council" (PDF). House of Commons Library Standard Note. SN/PC/2708. http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-3708.pdf. Retrieved 27 February 2009.
- ^ London Gazette: no. 52360. p. 19066. 11 December 1990. Retrieved 28 February 2008.
- ^ London Gazette: no. 52978. p. 11045. 26 June 1992. Retrieved 4 January 2012.
- ^ London Gazette: no. 54017. p. 6023. 25 April 1995. Retrieved 28 February 2008.
- ^ Ungoed-Thomas, Jon (8 February 1998). "Carlton Club to vote on women". The Sunday Times.
- ^ a b "Falklands to make 10 January Thatcher Day – Newspaper", Reuters News (6 January 1992).
- ^ Wheeler 2004, p. 171
- ^ Pat Roller, "Off the Record", Scottish Daily Record (10 January 2004), p. 10
- ^ "Speech receiving Medal of Freedom Award | Margaret Thatcher Foundation". http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108263. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
- ^ "Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees". Heritage Foundation. http://www.heritage.org/About/Departments/trustees.cfm. Retrieved 14 June 2008.
- ^ Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (13 September 2005). "Honoring the Iron Lady". Washington Times.
- ^ Thatcher, Margaret (23 September 1991). "First Clare Booth Luce Lecture". margaretthatcher.org. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108282. Retrieved 2 February 2011.
- ^ Younge, Gary (21 September 1999). "The lady's not for leaving". The Guardian.
- ^ "Image of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher unveiled". BBC News. 8 February 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12393674. Retrieved 9 February 2011.
- ^ Steinberg, Julie (22 December 2011). "'The Iron Lady' Draws Fire For Depicting Margaret Thatcher With Alzheimer's — Speakeasy — WSJ". The Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/12/22/the-iron-lady-draws-fire-for-depicting-thatcher-with-alzheimers/. Retrieved 28 February 2012.
- ^ "Anyone for Denis?". British Film Institute. http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/4789. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
- ^ Marr 2007, p. 417
- ^ Heard, Chris (4 May 2004). "Rocking against Thatcher". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3682281.stm.
Bibliography[link]
- Beckett, Andy (2010). When the Lights Went Out; Britain in the Seventies. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-22137-0.
- Burns, William E. (2009). A Brief History of Great Britain. Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-7728-1.
- Beckett, Clare (2006). Margaret Thatcher. Haus Publishing. ISBN 978-1-904950-71-4.
- Blundell, John (2008). Margaret Thatcher: a portrait of the Iron Lady. Algora. ISBN 978-0-87586-630-7.
- Butler, David; Butler, Gareth (1994). British Political Facts 1900–1994 (7 ed.). Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-52616-3.
- Campbell, John (2000). Margaret Thatcher; Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7418-7.
- Campbell, John (2003). Margaret Thatcher; Volume Two: The Iron Lady. Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6781-4.
- Childs, David (2006). Britain since 1945: a political history (6 ed.). Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-39326-3.
- Chin, Rita C-K (2009). After the Nazi racial state: difference and democracy in Germany and Europe. ISBN 978-0-472-11686-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=tqlrRJHwjKoC&pg=PA92.
- Cochrane, Feargal (2001). Unionist Politics and the Politics of Unionism Since the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Cork University Press. ISBN 1-85918-259-3.
- English, Richard (2005). Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-517753-4.
- Evans, Eric (2004). Thatcher and Thatcherism (The Making of the Contemporary World) (2 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-27013-7.
- Erickson, Carolly (2005). Lilibet: An Intimate Portrait of Elizabeth II. Macmillan. ISBN 0-312-33938-0.
- Feigenbaum, Harvey; Henig, Jeffrey; Hamnett, Chris (1998). Shrinking the State: The Political Underpinnings of Privatization. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-63918-7.
- Floud, Roderick; Johnson, Paul (2004). The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 3. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-52738-5.
- Foley, Michael (2002). John Major, Tony Blair and a Conflict of Leadership: Collision Course. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6317-5.
- Gamble, Andrew (2009). The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-23075-0.
- Gilbert, Martin (2002). A History of the Twentieth Century. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-050594-X.
- Glyn, Andrew (1992). "The 'Productivity Miracle', Profits and Investment'". In Michie, Jonathan. The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992. Academic Press. pp. 77–87. ISBN 978-0-12-494060-4.
- Görtemaker, Manfred (2006). Britain and Germany in the Twentieth Century. Berg Publishers. ISBN 1-85973-842-7.
- Hastings, Max; Jenkins, Simon (1983). Battle for the Falklands. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30198-2.
- Howe, Geoffrey (1994). Conflict of Loyalty. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-59283-0.
- Jackling, Roger (2005). "The Impact of the Falklands Conflict on Defence Policy". In Badsey, Stephen; Grove, Mark; Havers, Rob. The Falklands Conflict Twenty Years On: Lessons for the Future (Sandhurst Conference Series). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-35030-3.
- James, Clive (1977). Visions Before Midnight. ISBN 978-0-224-01386-4.
- Jones, Bill (1999). Political Issues in Britain Today. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-5432-X.
- Jones, Bill; Kavanagh, Dennis; Moran, Michael (2007). "Media organisations and the political process". Politics UK (6 ed.). Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-2411-8.
- Khabaz, D.V. (2007). Manufactured Schema: Thatcher, the Miners and the Culture Industry. Matador. ISBN 978-1-905237-61-6.
- Kavanagh, Dennis (1997). The Reordering of British Politics: Politics after Thatcher. OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-878201-8.
- Lacey, Robert (2003). Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-3669-6.
- Lawson, Nigel (1992). The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical. Bantam. ISBN 978-0-593-02218-4.
- McAleese, Dermott (2004). Economics For Business: Competition, Macro-stability & Globalisation (3 ed.). Financial Times Management. ISBN 978-0-273-68398-8.
- Marr, Andrew (2007). A History of Modern Britain. Pan. ISBN 978-0-330-43983-1.
- Moloney, Ed (2002). A Secret History of the IRA. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32502-4.
- Reitan, Earl Aaron (2003). The Thatcher Revolution: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, and the Transformation of Modern Britain, 1979–2001. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-2203-2.
- Richards, Howard (2004). Understanding the Global Economy. Peace Education Books. ISBN 0-9748961-0-1.
- Seldon, Anthony; Collings, Daniel (2000). Britain Under Thatcher. Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-31714-7.
- Senden, Linda (2004). Soft Law in European Community Law. Hart Publishing. ISBN 1-84113-432-5.
- Seward, Ingrid (2001). The Queen and Di: The Untold Story. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-561-2.
- Smith, Gordon (1989). Battles of the Falklands War. I. Allan. ISBN 978-0-7110-1792-4. http://www.naval-history.net/NAVAL1982FALKLANDS.htm.
- Thatcher, Margaret (1993). The Downing Street Years. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-255354-6.
- Thatcher, Margaret (1995). The Path to Power. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-638753-4.
- Thornton, Richard C. (2006). The Reagan Revolution II: Rebuilding the Western Alliance. Trafford Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4120-1356-7.
- Toye, Richard; Gottlieb, Julie V. (2005). Making Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in Modern British Politics. I. B. Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-841-2.
- Veljanovski, Cento (1990). "The Political Economy of Regulation". In Dunleavy, Patrick; Gamble, Andrew; Peele, Gillian. Developments in British Politics 3. Macmillan.
- Wapshott, Nicholas (2007). Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage. Sentinel. ISBN 1-59523-047-5.
- Wheeler, Tony (2004). The Falklands and South Georgia Island. Lonely Planet. ISBN 1-74059-643-9.
- Williams, Andy (1998). UK Government & Politics. Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-435-33158-0.
Further reading[link]
- Biographies
- Abse, Leo (1989). Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-02726-7.
- Dale, Iain, ed. (2000). Memories of Maggie. Politicos. ISBN 978-1-902301-51-8.
- Pugh, Peter; Flint, Carl (1997). Thatcher for Beginners. Icon Books. ISBN 978-1-874166-53-5.
- Young, Hugo (1993). One of Us: Life of Margaret Thatcher (2nd ed.). Pan Books. ISBN 978-0-330-32841-8.
- Political analysis
- Butler, David; Adonis, Andrew; Travers, Tony (1994). Failure in British government: the politics of the poll tax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-827876-4.
- Jenkins, Peter (1987). Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution: Ending of the Socialist Era. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-674-58833-2.
- Letwin, Shirley Robin (1992). The Anatomy of Thatcherism. Flamingo. ISBN 978-0-00-686243-7.
- Young, Hugo (1986). The Thatcher Phenomenon. BBC. ISBN 978-0-563-20473-2.
- Books by Thatcher
- Thatcher, Margaret; Harris, Robin (1997). Harris, Robin Harris. ed. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-018734-7.
- Thatcher, Margaret (2002). Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-019973-9.
- Ministerial autobiographies
- Heseltine, Michael (2001). Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography. Coronet. ISBN 978-0-340-73916-7.
- Major, John (1999). The Autobiography. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-653074-9.
- Parkinson, Cecil (1992). Right at the Centre. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-81262-3.
- Ridley, Nicholas (1991). 'My Style of Government': The Thatcher Years. Hutchinson. ISBN 978-0-09-175051-0.
- Tebbit, Norman (1988). Upwardly Mobile. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-79427-1.
External links[link]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Margaret Thatcher |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Margaret Thatcher |
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Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- Margaret Thatcher Foundation
- Margaret Thatcher and the Privatization Movement from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Margaret Thatcher
- Margaret Thatcher on the Downing Street website.
- Archival material relating to Margaret Thatcher listed at the UK National Register of Archives
- Records of the Prime Minister's Office, digitised files from the Prime Minister's Office, covering from the 1979 general election to December 1979.
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Margaret Thatcher at the Internet Movie Database
- Works by or about Margaret Thatcher in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Margaret Thatcher collected news and commentary at The Guardian
- Margaret Thatcher collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Actresses (and actors) who have portrayed Thatcher, The Telegraph (London), 8 February 2011. Retrieved 28 May 2011
- Portraits of Margaret Hilda Thatcher (née Roberts), Baroness Thatcher at the National Portrait Gallery, London
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Thatcher, Margaret Hilda, Baroness Thatcher |
| Alternative names | Roberts, Margaret Hilda |
| Short description | Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979–1990) |
| Date of birth | 13 October 1925 |
| Place of birth | Grantham, England |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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| The Right Honourable The Lord Hattersley PC |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Deputy Leader of the Labour Party | |
| In office 2 October 1983 – 18 July 1992 |
|
| Leader | Neil Kinnock |
| Preceded by | Denis Healey |
| Succeeded by | Margaret Beckett |
| Shadow Home Secretary | |
| In office 13 July 1987 – 25 July 1992 |
|
| Leader | Neil Kinnock |
| Preceded by | Gerald Kaufman |
| Succeeded by | Tony Blair |
| In office 4 November 1980 – 11 June 1983 |
|
| Leader | Michael Foot |
| Preceded by | Merlyn Rees |
| Succeeded by | Gerald Kaufman |
| Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer | |
| In office 31 October 1983 – 18 July 1987 |
|
| Leader | Neil Kinnock |
| Preceded by | Peter Shore |
| Succeeded by | John Smith |
| Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection | |
| In office 10 September 1976 – 4 May 1979 |
|
| Prime Minister | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Shirley Williams |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished |
| Member of Parliament for Birmingham Sparkbrook |
|
| In office 15 October 1964 – 1 May 1997 |
|
| Preceded by | Leslie Seymour |
| Succeeded by | Constituency Abolished |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1932-12-28) 28 December 1932 (age 79) Sheffield, United Kingdom |
| Political party | Labour |
| Alma mater | University of Hull |
| Profession | Journalist |
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley FRSL (born 28 December 1932) is a British Labour politician, author and journalist from Sheffield. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Roy Hattersley has been a socialist and Labour supporter from his youth, electioneering at the age of 12 for his local MP and city councillors, beginning in 1945. His own mother, Enid Hattersley, was a city councillor, and later, Lord Mayor of Sheffield (in 1981). Enid Hattersley kept the fact secret from her son (until he was in his 50s) that his father, who died an atheist, had been a Roman Catholic priest, Father Frederick Hattersley, and had renounced the Church to marry her.[1]
Education[link]
He won a scholarship to Sheffield City Grammar School and went from there to study at the University of Hull. Having been accepted to read English at the University of Leeds,[2] he was diverted into reading Economics when told by a Sheffield colleague of his mother that it was necessary for a political career.
At university Hattersley joined the Socialist Society (SocSoc) and was one of those responsible for changing its name to the "Labour Club" and affiliating it with the non-aligned International Union of Socialist Youth rather than the Soviet-backed International Union of Students. Hattersley became chairman of the new club and later treasurer, and he went on to chair the National Association of Labour Student Organisations. He also joined the executive of the IUSY.
Member of Parliament[link]
After graduating Hattersley worked briefly for a Sheffield steelworks and then for two years with the Workers' Educational Association. He also married his wife Molly, who became a headteacher and educational administrator. In 1956 he was elected to the City Council as Labour representative for Crookesmoor and was, very briefly, a JP. On the Council he spent time as chairman of the Public Works Committee and then the Housing Committee.
His aim became a Westminster seat, and he was eventually selected for Labour to stand for election in the Sutton Coldfield constituency but lost to the Conservative Geoffrey Lloyd in 1959. He kept hunting for prospective candidacies, applying for twenty-five seats over three years. In 1963 he was chosen as the prospective parliamentary candidate for the multi-racial Birmingham Sparkbrook constituency (following a well-known local 'character', Jack Webster) and facing a Conservative majority of just under 900. On 16 October 1964 he was elected by 1,254 votes; he was to hold that seat for the next eight general elections.
Journalist[link]
At first he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Herbison, the Minister for Pensions. His maiden speech was on a housing subsidies bill. Still a Gaitskellite, he also joined the 1963 Club. He also wrote his first Endpiece column for The Spectator (the column moved to The Listener in 1979 and then to The Guardian).
Ministerial positions[link]
Despite the support of Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland he did not gain a ministerial position until 1967, joining Ray Gunter at the Ministry of Labour. He was reportedly disliked by Prime Minister Harold Wilson as a "Jenkinsite". The following year he was promoted to Under Secretary in the same ministry, now led by Barbara Castle, and become closely involved in implementing the unpopular Prices and Incomes Act. In 1969 after the fiasco over In Place of Strife he was promoted to deputy to Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence, following the death of Gerry Reynolds. One of his first jobs, while Healey was hospitalised, was to sign the Army Board Order – putting troops into Northern Ireland.
European Common Market[link]
The Labour defeat of 1970 ended six years of Labour government. Hattersley was to hold his seat — often increasing his majority — but for the next twenty-six years as MP he was to spend twenty one in Opposition. He was appointed Deputy Foreign Affairs Spokesman, again under Healey, which involved a lot of foreign travel if nothing else. He also took a Visiting Fellowship to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. During this time he also became an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Market, his "drift to the political centre" put him at odds with much of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). He was one of the sixty-nine 'rebels' who voted with the Conservative government for entry into the EEC, which precipitated the resignation of Roy Jenkins as deputy leader (10 April 1972) and eventually a permanent split within Labour. (It was the adoption of a referendum on the EEC as shadow cabinet policy that caused Jenkins to resign.) For 'standing by' the party Hattersley was appointed Shadow Defence Secretary 1972 to 1973 and later Shadow Secretary of State for Education (the one government post he had always coveted).
Privy Council[link]
In the Wilson government of 1974 he was appointed the (non-cabinet) Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and in 1975 he was appointed a Privy Councillor. Hattersley headed the British delegation to Reykjavik during the "Cod War", but was primarily given the task of renegotiating the terms of the UK's membership of the EEC. Following the resignation of Wilson he voted for Jim Callaghan in the ensuing leadership contest in order to stop Michael Foot (a man "[who] for all his virtues... could not become Prime Minister"). Under Callaghan he finally made it into the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection, a position he held until Labour's defeat in the 1979 General Election.
"Election campaigns all have distinct characteristics. For Labour, 1983 was ludicrous, and 1987 was desperate. At least 1979 was only dismal." In 1979 Hattersley was appointed to shadow Michael Heseltine as the Minister for the Environment, contending with him over the cuts in local government powers and the "right to buy". Following the rise of the 'hard left', as demonstrated at the 1980 Labour Conference, Callaghan resigned. The leadership contest was between Healey and Foot, with Hattersley organising Healey's campaign. "An electorate [the PLP] deranged by fear" elected Foot. Healey was made deputy leader and Hattersley was appointed Shadow Home Secretary, but felt that Foot was "a good man in the wrong job", "a baffling combination of the admirable and the absurd". Healey was challenged for his post in 1981, following electoral rule changes, by Tony Benn, retaining his post by 50.426% to 49.574%. Hattersley felt that "the Bennite alliance [although defeated] ... played a major part in keeping the Conservatives in power for almost twenty years". Hattersley also had very little regard for those Labour defectors who created the SDP in 1981. He helped found Labour Solidarity (1981–83) and credits the group with preventing the disintegration of the Party.
Deputy Leader[link]
Following Labour's devastating defeat in the 1983 general election Foot declined to continue as leader. Hattersley stood in the subsequent leadership election, John Smith was his campaign manager and a young Peter Mandelson also impressed Hattersley. The other competitors were Neil Kinnock, Peter Shore and Eric Heffer. Hattersley had the support of most of the Shadow Cabinet, but the majority of the PLP, the constituency groups and the unions were in favour of Kinnock. In the final count Kinnock secured around three times as many votes as the second-place Hattersley.
As was standard practice at the time Hattersley became deputy leader. The combination was promoted at the time as being a "dream ticket" with Kinnock a representative of the left of the party and Hattersley of the right. Hattersley remained deputy for eight years and also Shadow Chancellor until 1987, when he moved back to Shadow Home Affairs.
Kinnock and Hattersley went to work to rehabilitate Labour after 1983. After the Miners' Strike they purged the Militant tendency and in 1988 they fought off a leadership challenge by Tony Benn and Eric Heffer. Defeat in 1987 was expected; by 1992 it was much more even. Labour had regularly topped opinion polls since 1989 and at one stage had a lead of up to 15 points over the Tories, though this was cut back and more than once overhauled by the Tories after the resignation of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister to make way for John Major in November 1990.
In the run-up to the 1992 election, Hattersley was present at the Labour Party rally in his native Sheffield and backed up Kinnock with the claim that "with every day that passes, Neil looks more and more like the real tenant of number 10 Downing Street".[3]
Backbenches and retirement[link]
The general election was finally held on 9 April 1992, but saw Labour defeated by the Conservatives, who were elected for a fourth successive term. Kinnock announced his resignation as party leader on 13 April, and on the same day Hattersley announced his intention to resign from the deputy leadership of the party, with the intention of carrying on in their roles until the new leadership was elected that summer.[4]
Hattersley supported his friend John Smith in the leadership contest, which Smith won in July that year. In 1993 Hattersley announced he would leave politics at the following general election. He was made a life peer as Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook, in the County of West Midlands.
Hattersley was long regarded as being on the right of the party, but with New Labour in power he found himself criticising a Labour government from the left, even claiming that "Blair's Labour Party is not the Labour Party I joined". He has also mentioned repeatedly that he would be supporting Gordon Brown as leader.
Hattersley is the author of many books including three novels and many biographies. In 1996 he was fined for an incident involving his dog, Buster, after it killed a goose in one of London's royal parks. He later wrote the "diary" of Buster, writing from the dog's perspective on the incident, in which it claimed to have acted in self-defence.[citation needed] In January 2010, after the death of Buster the previous October, Hattersley adopted a white bull-terrier dog called Jake from an animal rescue centre.[5]
In 2008, Hattersley appeared in a documentary on the DVD for the Doctor Who serial, Doctor Who and the Silurians, to discuss the political climate that existed at the time of making the serial.
He now writes a regular column, "In Search Of England", for the Daily Mail about different parts of the United Kingdom; it normally appears in the paper on Tuesdays.
In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [6] His latest book, a biography of Lloyd George The Great Outsider: David Lloyd George was published by Little, Brown in 2010.
Sport fan[link]
Hattersley is a life-long supporter of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club and also a keen cricket follower.
Partial bibliography[link]
- David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider Little Brown (2010) ISBN 978-1-4087-0097-6
- The Edwardians: Biography of the Edwardian Age (2004) ISBN 0-316-72537-4
- The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (2002) ISBN 978-0-385-50334-1
- Buster's Diaries (1999) ISBN 0-7515-2917-6
- Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army (1999) ISBN 0-316-85161-2
- 50 Years on: Prejudiced History of Britain Since the War (1997) ISBN 0-316-87932-0
- No Discouragement: An Autobiography (1996) ISBN 0-333-64957-5
- Who Goes Home?: Scenes from a Political Life (1995) ISBN 0-316-87669-0
- Between Ourselves (1994) ISBN 0-330-32574-4
- Skylark's Song (1993) ISBN 0-333-55608-9
- In That Quiet Earth (1993) ISBN 0-330-32303-2
- The Maker's Mark (1990) ISBN 0-333-47032-X
- Choose Freedom: Future of Democratic Socialism (1987) ISBN 0-14-010494-1
- A Yorkshire Boyhood (1983) ISBN 0-7011-2613-2
- Press Gang (1983) ISBN 0-86051-205-3
- Goodbye to Yorkshire (1976) ISBN 0-575-02201-9
References[link]
- ^ Published: 12:00AM BST 22 May 2001 (2001-05-22). "Enid Hattersley's obituary". London: Telegraph.co.uk. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1331135/Enid-Hattersley.html. Retrieved 2010-05-20.
- ^ "Books for pleasure", The Guardian, 12 February 2007. Retrieved on 13 February 2007.
- ^ Barnard, Stephanie (2009-07-27). "BBC - Sheffield & South Yorkshire - Kinnock came and didn't conquer". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/sheffield/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8170000/8170344.stm. Retrieved 2010-05-20.
- ^ "1992: Labour's Neil Kinnock resigns". BBC News. 13 April 1992. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/13/newsid_2830000/2830895.stm.
- ^ [1] Times, 21 Jan 2010
- ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows. Retrieved 9 August 2010.
External links[link]
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Roy Hattersley |
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Roy Hattersley
- Buster's Diaries official site
- Guardian columns by Roy Hattersley
- New Statesman articles by Roy Hattersley
- Roy Hattersley, New Statesman, 10 May 2004, 'We should have made it clear that we too were modernisers'
- Roy Hattersley and Kevin Hickson Political Quarterly, 8 September 2011,In Praise of Social Democracy
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Leslie Seymour |
Member of Parliament for Birmingham Sparkbrook 1964–1997 |
Constituency abolished |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Shirley Williams |
Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection 1976–1979 |
Position abolished |
| Preceded by Merlyn Rees |
Shadow Home Secretary 1980–1983 |
Succeeded by Gerald Kaufman |
| Preceded by Peter Shore |
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983–1987 |
Succeeded by John Smith |
| Preceded by Gerald Kaufman |
Shadow Home Secretary 1987–1992 |
Succeeded by Tony Blair |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by Denis Healey |
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party 1983–1992 |
Succeeded by Margaret Beckett |
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Hattersley, Roy |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | British Labour Party politician, published author and journalist |
| Date of birth | (1932-12-28) 28 December 1932 (age 79) |
| Place of birth | Sheffield, England, UK |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
