Stephen Byers

Stephen Byers (born April 13, 1953 in Wolverhampton , West Midlands ) is a British Labor Party politician who was a member of the House of Commons between 1992 and 2010 and was both trade and industry minister as well as transport minister and had to resign in 2002.

Life

University lecturer and member of the House of Commons

After attending Chester City Grammar School , Byers studied law at Liverpool John Moores University and was a law lecturer at Northumbria University from 1977 to 1992 after completing his studies . In 1980 he began his political career in local politics as a member of the local council of North Tyneside , its deputy chairman, he was between 1985 and 1992.

In the general election of April 9, 1992 , he was elected for the first time as a candidate of the Labor Party to a member of the House of Commons, where he first represented the constituency of Wallsend and after the general election from May 1, 1997 to May 6, 2010, the constituency of North Tyneside . During his parliamentary membership he was Whip from 1994 to 1995 and then until 1997 spokesman for education and employment of the opposition Labor faction in the lower house.

Minister and resignation

After the Labor Party won the general election on May 1, 1997, he was first Minister of State in the Ministry of Education and Employment and then in July 1998 Chief Secretary to the Treasury .

During a cabinet reshuffle in December 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him Secretary of State for Trade and Industry , the successor to Peter Mandelson , who had to resign due to a secret loan scandal.

He was again in 2000 because of the situation in Automobilhgersteller Rover criticized the earlier account of economic difficulties out of the BMW - Group was spun. There was also criticism of his decision as Minister of Commerce that Richard Desmond , a publisher of pornographic magazines , took over Express Newspapers in 2000 with the help of a loan from Commerzbank AG , which publishes the Daily Express , Sunday Express and Daily Star newspapers . The takeover of power at the newspaper went hand in hand with a political change in the orientation of the newspaper in favor of the Labor Party . A competition law review by the Labor government did not take place. Desmond then donated £ 100,000 to the Labor Party, which sparked controversy. Some prominent Labor members, including Clare Short , then asked whether the party should accept money from a porn newspaper publisher.

As part of a further government reshuffle after the general election of June 7, 2001 , he became Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and held that office until June 2002. During this period he held the position Railway supply company Railtrack plc on October 7, 2001 after a corresponding application to the High Court of Justice under compulsory liquidation. This was due to the one the momentous railroad accident in the station of Hatfield , on the other hand that the company, despite the poor financial condition and received subsidies dividends in the amount of 137 million pounds to its shareholders had paid. Critics accused the Labor Party of deliberately driving Railtrack into bankruptcy in order to nationalize at least part of the British railway system.

On 28 May 2002 he had as transport minister to resign after it came to massive criticism, as his political adviser and close associate Jo Moore on the day of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 an e-mail sent to the press department with the content: "It is now a very good day to get rid of everything we wanted to bury. ”('It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.') Furthermore, the Express Newspaper decision from 2000 came again on.

After his resignation, Byers remained as a backbencher in the House of Commons, before he waived in the 2010 general election to run again. One of the reasons for this was that he was involved in the so-called "cash for influence scandal". The magazine program Dispatches revealed in bogus interviews that numerous MPs and ministers such as Byers, Geoff Hoon , Patricia Hewitt , Richard Caborn and Adam Paterson Ingram were willing to accept a four-digit daily fee, although no consideration was provided.

Web links

• Stephen Byers at Hansard (English)
• Entry in They Work For You
• Stephen Byers: Electoral history and profile ( Memento of March 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: The Guardian (accessed December 18, 2011)