Keith Vaz

Keith Vaz MP
Member of Parliament for Leicester East
Incumbent
Assumed office 11 June 1987
Preceded by	Peter Bruinvels
Personal details
Born	(1956-11-26) 26 November 1956
Nationality	British
Political party	Labour
Alma mater	Caius College, Cambridge

Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz, known simply as Keith Vaz (born November 26 1956), is a British Labour party politician and Member of Parliament for Leicester East.

Early life

Vaz, a Roman Catholic, was born in Aden in 1956, where his father (originally from Goa; hence the Portuguese surname) was a foreign correspondent for The Times of India. His family moved to Twickenham in England in 1965.

Educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, he subsequently studied law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he received a B.A., class 2.1 (1979) and an MA (1987). At this time he was known as Nigel Vaz.

Personal life

Vaz worked as a Solicitor for a number of years, including for Richmond Council (1982); as Senior solicitor for the London Borough of Islington (1982-1985); and as Solicitor at Highfields and Belgrave Law Centre in Leicester (1985-1987).

He and his wife Maria have two children.

Political career

Vaz first stood for parliament in 1983, when he contested the Conservative safe seat of Richmond and Barnes in the 1983 general election, which he failed to win.

For the 1987 election he was chosen to stand for the seat of Leicester East, which had 16,000 British Asian voters. He won the election, defeating the right-wing Conservative candidate Peter Bruinvels, and became a popular constituency MP, the first Asian MP since Shapurji Saklatvala lost his seat in 1929. From 1987 to 1992 he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

In March 1989, he led a protest in Leicester against Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. [1] At this event, Vaz addressed 3000 Muslim demonstrators, stating "today we celebrate one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain" and attacked the Labour Party as a "godless party" [2]. In February 1990, he wrote in The Guardian newspaper urging Salman Rushdie not to publish the book in paperback because "there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech".

Vaz became a frontbench spokesman on the Environment for the Official Opposition in 1992 and between 1993 and 1994 was a Member of the Executive Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. On Labour winning power in 1997, he became a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Government's Law Officers.

In 1999 he was promoted, becoming Minister for Europe in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and was tipped to become a Cabinet Minister, but it was at this point in time that he met his fall from grace.

Filkin inquiry

In February 2000 the Parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin was requested to investigate allegations of undisclosed payments to Vaz from businessmen in his constituency. The following year, 2001, members of the opposition began to question what role Vaz may have played in helping the billionaire Indian Hinduja brothers - linked with a corruption probe in India - to secure UK passports.

In March 2001, the Filkin report cleared Vaz of nine of the 18 allegations of various financial wrongdoings, but Elizabeth Filkin accused Mr Vaz of blocking her investigation into eight of the allegations. He was also censured for one allegation - that he failed to register two payments worth £450 in total from Sarosh Zaiwalla, a solicitor whom he recommended for an honour several years later.

Mrs Filkin announced in the same month a new inquiry which would focus on whether or not a company connected to Vaz received a donation from a charitable foundation run by the Hinduja brothers. The results of the inquiry were published in 2002 and it was concluded that Vaz had "committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and a contempt of the House" and it was recommended that he be suspended from the House of Commons for one month.

Keith Vaz was also a director of the company General Mediterranean Holdings' owned by the Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who had in the past hired British politicians Lord David Steel and Lord Norman Lamont as directors. Vaz resigned his post as director when he became Minister for Europe, but it was later discovered that he had remained in contact with Auchi and had made enquiries on his behalf over a French extradition warrant, Auchi even calling Vaz at home to ask the minister for advice.

Since 2003 he has been a Member of the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. Once suggested as a possible candidate for a future leader of the Labour Party, it is unclear whether he will ever return to a frontbench role.

Black Socialist Society

Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) voted to resurrect the defunct Black Socialist Society (BSS) in 2006. As part of this, the party set up an Ethnic Minority Taskforce. Tony Blair appointed Vaz to chair this taskforce. When membership of the BSS exceeded 2,500 in early 2007, the society qualified for its own seat on the NEC. Vaz was elected to this post on March 10 2007.

Home Affairs Select Committee

Vaz was elected Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, replacing John Denham, on the 27th July 2007. He joined the committee by way of an unorthodox Government Parliamentary procedure the previous day.

Campaigns

Vaz has been called by some "the Jack Thompson of the UK" for his stance against what he perceives as violent computer games, and his outspoken views on their content. He has called for the '18'-rated Rockstar game Manhunt to be banned after claiming that the killers of British schoolboy Stefan Pakeerah had been influenced by the game. It had already been established by investigators however that the only person involved in the case who owned the game was the victim, Stefan, (despite him being only fourteen years old—an irony considering his mother's subsequent campaigning) and detectives ruled out Manhunt's influence on the killers' behaviour as there was no evidence that they had even heard of it.. This lack of even circumstantial evidence may, to some, appear to undermine the main foundations of Vaz's argument, and he has yet to provide a response to these points.

He has more recently voiced concern regarding the Rockstar game Canis Canem Edit (Bully in the US), suggesting that it also should be banned in the UK. He first raised the subject as early as October 2005, a year before the final game was released, expressing his concerns over Bully during Prime Minister's Question Time to Geoff Hoon who was taking Tony Blair's place at the time. He has reportedly not seen the actual game at any point, and has formed his views on it from the publisher's publicity material. During a piece on Radio 4 on January 9 2007, Mr Vaz again talked about Bully (using this former name, not its revised name) and implied it was a bullying simulator, again implying that he has still not played it himself. He asked Hoon: "Does the leader of the house share my concern at the decision of Rockstar Games to publish a new game called Bully in which players use their on-screen persona to kick and punch other schoolchildren?"

Vaz also entered the recent debate about racism on Celebrity Big Brother 2007; calling Jade Goody a bully for her treatment of Indian movie star Shilpa Shetty on the programme. He subsequently invited Shetty to the Houses of Parliament, where she had tea with Tony Blair. It is not known whether Mr Vaz was at the meeting.

External links

• Keith Vaz - Official Site
• Guardian Politics Ask Aristotle - Keith Vaz MP
• TheyWorkForYou.com - Keith Vaz MP