Leon Brittan

Leon Brittan (2011)

Leon Brittan, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne , PC (born September 25, 1939 in London ; † January 21, 2015 ibid) was a barrister , British Conservative politician, member of the British Parliament , the British Government and the European Commission . His brother is the former editor and journalist of the Financial Times Sir Samuel Brittan .

Life

Brittan received his education at Haberdashers 'Aske's Boys' School and later studied at Trinity College , Cambridge , where he became President of the Cambridge Union Society and took his Masters degree. He later studied at Yale University as a Henry Fellow. In 1962 he was admitted to the bar and began a career as a lawyer.

After running unsuccessfully for North Kensington constituency in 1966 and 1970 , he was elected in the February 1974 general election in Cleveland and Whitby constituency, served on his party's employment committee and became opposition spokesman in 1976. In his party he was responsible for decentralization. In 1978 he was appointed crown attorney .

Between 1979 and 1981 he held the post of Minister of State in the Home Office, before moving to the post of Secretary of State in the Treasury, a position that is already a member of the UK Cabinet. In 1981 Brittan also became a member of the Privy Council . In 1983 he changed his constituency and entered the constituency of Richmond , Yorkshire , successfully . From 1983 to 1985 he was Home Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet . He was then appointed to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce by Thatcher. He resigned as industry minister in early 1986: he stumbled in the Westland affair , where, like Thatcher, he advocated the merger of the last British helicopter manufacturer, Westland Aircraft, with its American competitor Sikorsky , because it became public that he had a critical dossier about Defense Minister Michael Heseltine 's Press, who followed a different strategy on the Westland affair.

In 1988 he became a lecturer at the Institute for Political Science. He resigned when he was Vice-President of the European Commission from 1989 to 1993 and from 1995 to 1999 . From 1993 to 1994 he was Commissioner responsible for foreign economic and trade policy at the European Commission. During his tenure he occasionally ventilated the project of a joint European-American free trade area . He already saw protective provisions in the health, environmental and social sectors as technical barriers to trade. From 1995 to 1999 Brittan was a trade commissioner for Jacques Santer's European Commission , which had to resign in 1999 because of massive corruption allegations.

In 2000 he was appointed a life peer by the Queen of Great Britain as Baron Brittan of Spennithorne , of Spennithorne in the County of North Yorkshire and has been a member of the House of Lords ever since . He was Vice Chairman of UBS AG Investment Bank as well as legal advisor to Unilever and a consultant to the law firm Herbert Smith.

Brittan was married and had two stepdaughters.

Investigations against the Westminster Pedophile Ring

In his role as Home Secretary, Geoffrey Dickens, a member of the Conservative House of Commons, received a dossier in November 1983 with the names of high-ranking politicians accused of child abuse. In March 1984 Brittan informed Dickens that the dossier had been examined by the Crown Prosecution Service and had now been forwarded to the police. As a result, no investigations by the police are known and under no circumstances will proceedings be initiated against any of the accused. As part of the investigation into allegations of child abuse against Jimmy Savile , allegations that a group of high-ranking men in and around Parliament were also abusing children are again raised in public. The police open a formal investigation in which Leon Brittan is also questioned about what happened in the 1980s. The dossier originally written by Geoffrey Dickens could no longer be found in 2014 and Brittan changes his information about what exactly happened to the elaboration twice. These events raise voices that the allegations were deliberately concealed. In November 2014, Peter Wanless , the head of the British child protection organization NSPCC, presented the so-called Wanless Report , on the basis of which the original report by Geoffrey Dickens is considered "lost". So far not known, but it was found that Dickens had requested Brittan several times in addition to the handover of the dossier to take action against a group known as the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The new investigation by Peter Wanless was able to uncover the destruction of files in connection with the affair, but no signs of a systematic cover-up of the proceedings in the Ministry of the Interior could be found, but the one that has meanwhile been suspected of being involved in the cover-up The MI5 domestic intelligence agency was exonerated. In spite of the report, Interior Minister Theresa May did not want to rule out that the investigations into the then accused had been influenced by the Interior Ministry and initiated a further investigation.

Others

In 2012 he worked as a contemporary witness in the documentary “ The Brussels Business - Who controls the European Union? " With. His statements were based on his experience as EU Trade Commissioner from 1993 to 1999.

Web links

• Stephen Castle: Leon Brittan Dies at 75; British Official in Leak Case. Obituary in The New York Times, January 27, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Daily Telegraph Leon Brittan dies, aged 75. Retrieved January 22, 2015 . 
2. ↑ Westminster pedophile ring allegations: timeline in The Daily Telegraph, November 11, 2014, accessed January 23, 2015
3. ↑ Theresa May: Home Office could have covered up pedophile claims in The Daily Telegraph, November 11, 2014, accessed January 23, 2015