John Diamond, Baron Diamond

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John "Jack" Diamond, Baron Diamond PC (born April 30, 1907 in Leeds , † April 3, 2004 in Little Chalfont , Buckinghamshire ) was a British politician of the Labor Party and later the Social Democratic Party (SDP) for nineteen years Member of the House of Commons and between 1964 and 1970 Chief Secretary of the Treasury ( Chief Secretary of HM Treasury ) was and in 1970 due to the Life Peerages Act 1958 as Life Peer member of the House of Lords .

Life

Member of the House of Commons and loss of office

Diamond, son of Rabbi Solomon Diamond, graduated from Leeds Grammar School and worked as an accountant from 1931 .

After the end of the Second World War , Diamond was elected as a candidate for the Labor Party in the general election of July 5, 1945 in the constituency of Manchester Blackley for the first time as a member of the House of Commons, with 19,561 votes (44.7 percent) clearly against the previous one Conservative Party's constituency holder , John Lees-Jones , won, who received just 14,747 votes and 33.7 percent of the vote. In 1947 he was briefly in the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Works ( Minister of Works ) George Tomlinson . Subsequently, he was between 1947 and 1953 chairman of the finance committee of the National Nursing Council .

After Diamond was re-elected in the general election on February 23, 1950 in the Manchester Blackley constituency with a majority of only 42 votes over the candidate of the Conservative Tories , he suffered a significant defeat against his challenger from the Conservative Party in the following election on October 25, 1951 , Eric Johnson : While Johnson got 25,076 votes (49.0 percent), Diamond received only 22,804 votes (44.6 percent), and was thus eliminated from the House of Commons.

In addition, Diamond, who wrote Socialism the British Way in 1948 , was treasurer of the socialist intellectual movement Fabian Society between 1950 and 1964 .

Re-election to the lower house, cabinet member and renewed loss of office

After the death of the former deputies Moss Turner-Samuels Diamond was at a by-election ( by-election ) in the constituency Gloucester turn elected on 12 September 1957 to the MPs in the House of Commons. During this time, he was from 1957 to 1964 and director of the Trust of the Sadler's Wells - theater . Together with Roy Jenkins he founded the party-internal committee for the internal market ( Labor Common Market Committee ) as a staunch European in 1962 .

After the election of the Labor Party in the general election of October 15, 1964 Diamond was Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the Treasury (the Chief Secretary Chief Secretary of the Treasury ) called and held thus by the Treasury chancellors ( Chancellor of the Exchequer ) , James Callaghan and Roy Jenkins to at the end of Wilson's tenure on June 19, 1970, the second most important function in the Treasury. This position was upgraded to Diamond, who also became Privy Councilor in 1965 , when the office of chief secretary officially received cabinet rank in 1968. As chief secretary he had to defend the selective income tax SET ( Selective Employment Tax ) introduced by the Wilson administration in the House of Commons , which later Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher compared with an opera in a parliamentary debate.

In the general election on June 18, 1970 , he surprisingly suffered an electoral defeat against his challenger from the Conservative Party, Sally Oppenheim-Barnes . Diamond was the only previous member of the Wilson administration to lose his mandate in the House of Commons.

House of Lords

Through a letters patent dated September 25, 1970, Diamond was raised to the nobility as a life peer with the title Baron Diamond , of the City of Gloucester, under the Life Peerages Act and was thus a member of the House of Lords until his death .

After Harold Wilson became Prime Minister again after the general election on February 28, 1974 , he was appointed by Wilson to chair the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth . At the same time, he was a member of the Prime Minister's Advisory Committee on Business Appointments of Civil Servants from 1975 to 1978 .

Baron Diamond, who was also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA), was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Law (Hon. LL.D.) from the University of Leeds in 1978 .

In 1981 he left the Labor Party and instead became a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) founded on March 26, 1981 by former Labor politicians Roy Jenkins, David Owen , Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams . He was then from 1982 to 1988 chairman of the faction of the SDP in the upper house ( Leader of the Social Democratic Party in the House of Lords ). In 1995 he rejoined the Labor Party as a member.

When he died, Baron Diamond, 96, had served in the UK Parliament for around 53 years.

Publications

  • Socialism the British Way , 1948
  • Public Expenditure in Practice , 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Dorey (editor): The Labor Governments 1964-1970 , 2004, p. 203, ISBN 0-20332-7-225
  2. ↑ Jonathan Aitken: Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality , 2013, pp. 113 f., ISBN 1-40883-1-864
personal data
SURNAME Diamond, John, Baron Diamond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Diamond, John, Baron Diamond (full name); Diamond, Jack (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician, member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Leeds
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 2004
Place of death Little Chalfont , Buckinghamshire