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Donorgate
The Labour party proxy and undeclared donations was a political scandal involving the British Labour Party (UK), Labour Party in November and December 2007, when it was discovered that, contrary to legislation passed during the Tony Blair, Blair Government, the Party had been receiving significant financial donations made anonymously via third parties. The careers of Labour Party treasurer Peter Watt and the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Wendy Alexander, were curtailed as a consequence. In May 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence for any prosecution relating to these events. Background Abrahams donations Tyneside lawyer David Martin Abrahams, David Abrahams had donated at least £548,850 to the Labour Party since 2003 via two colleagues, his solicitor and the wife of an employee, which broke electoral law forbidding the use of proxy donors. Abrahams had been involved with the Labour party over many years. In the time since Prime Ministe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. Watt was then a member of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) Executive Board. He is now working for Hammersmith council directing all services relating to children. Early and family life 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, as of 2007, the father of three children as well as a foster carer. Labour Party 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 th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General Secretary Of The Labour Party
The General Secretary of the Labour Party is the most senior employee of the British Labour Party, and acts as the non-voting secretary to the National Executive Committee. When there is a vacancy the National Executive Committee selects a provisional replacement, subject to approval at the subsequent party conference. The post is currently held by David Evans, following Jennie Formby's resignation on 4 May 2020. He was formally confirmed in his role by a card vote at the 2021 Labour Conference on 25th September 2021. Party structure The General Secretary heads a staff of around 200 in their two head offices, one in London (formerly Southside, until October 2022) and Labour Central in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in the many local offices around the country. The Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties are headed by their own general secretaries, de facto subordinate to the national general secretary. The General Secretary is responsible for employing staff; campaign and media strategies ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Martin Abrahams
David Martin Abrahams (born 13 November 1944) is an English entrepreneur, philanthropist and political activist. Early life Abrahams was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and brought up in Whitley Bay as the only child in a strongly political family. His father Bennie Abrahams (1906–1990) was a Labour councillor for the Monkchester ward of Newcastle City Councilfor 35 years, and served as the city's Lord Mayor for one year in 1981-2. His mother Marion Marcelline Abrahams was a concert hall violinist for the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and a Labour councillor in Newcastle. Abrahams was educated at Ascham House preparatory school, now Newcastle School for Boys in Gosforth, and passed his 11+ to Rutherford Grammar School. In 1977, Mohammed Ali paid a visit to the Abrahams family home in Gosforth, where his 105-year-old Grandmother Annie Abrahams chatted to him about the underprivileged. In July 1979, he accompanied his Grandmother aged 107 to meet the Queen at Buckingham ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The Labour Party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. In all general elections since 1922, Labour has been either the governing party or the Official Opposition. There have been six Labour prime ministers and thirteen Labour ministries. The party holds the annual Labour Party Conference, at which party policy is formulated. The party was founded in 1900, having grown out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century. It overtook the Liberal Party to become the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the early 1920s, forming two minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s and early 1930s. Labour served in the wartime coalition of 1940–1945, after which Clement Attlee's Labour government established the National Health Service and expanded the welfa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gateshead
Gateshead () is a large town in northern England. It is on the River Tyne's southern bank, opposite Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle to which it is joined by seven bridges. The town contains the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, Millennium Bridge, Sage Gateshead, The Sage, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and has on its outskirts the twenty metre tall Angel of the North sculpture. Historic counties of England, Historically part of County Durham, under the Local Government Act 1888 the town was made a county borough, meaning it was administered independently of the county council. Since 1974, the town has been administered as part of the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead within Tyne and Wear. In the 2011 Census, town had a population 120,046 while the wider borough had 200,214. Toponymy Gateshead is first mentioned in Latin translation in Bede, Bede's ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'' as ''ad caput caprae'' ("at the goat's head"). This interpretation is consis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electoral Commission (United Kingdom)
In the United Kingdom, the Electoral Commission is the national election commission, created in 2001 as a result of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. It is an independent agency that regulates party and election finance and sets standards for how elections should be run. History The Electoral Commission was created following a recommendation by the fifth report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The Commission's mandate was set out in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA), and ranges from the regulation of political donations and expenditure by political and third parties through to promoting greater participation in the electoral process. The Electoral Administration Act 2006 required local authorities to review all polling stations, and to provide a report on the reviews to the Electoral Commission. The Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 granted the Electoral Commission a variety of new supervisory a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonathan Mendelsohn (lobbyist)
Jonathan Neil Mendelsohn, Baron Mendelsohn (born 30 December 1966) is a British lobbyist and Labour political organiser. He was appointed the Director of General Election Resources for the party in 2007. "Lobbygate" With Neal Lawson and Ben Lucas, he founded LLM Communications in 1997, a lobbying firm with easy access to the new Labour Government. He has been a spokesman and lobbyist for the gambling company PartyGaming. In 1998, he was caught on tape along with Derek Draper boasting to Greg Palast, an undercover reporter posing as a businessman, about how they could sell access to government ministers and create tax breaks for their clients in a scandal that was dubbed "Lobbygate". Draper denied the allegations. In the same incident Mendelsohn was approached by an undercover journalist posing as a representative of American energy companies who were seeking to ignore environmental laws. Despite LLM's claim that "we believe that there will be a new breed of 'ethical winners' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Office Of The Deputy Prime Minister
An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the term "office" may refer to business-related tasks. In law, a company or organization has offices in any place where it has an official presence, even if that presence consists of (for example) a storage silo rather than an establishment with desk-and-chair. An office is also an architectural and design phenomenon: ranging from a small office such as a bench in the corner of a small business of extremely small size (see small office/home office), through entire floors of buildings, up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Highways Agency
National Highways, formerly the Highways Agency and later Highways England, is a government-owned company charged with operating, maintaining and improving motorways and major A roads in England. It also sets highways standards used by all four UK administrations, through the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges. Within England, it operates information services through the provision of on-road signage and its Traffic England website, provides traffic officers to deal with incidents on its network, and manages the delivery of improvement schemes to the network. Founded as an executive agency, it was converted into a government-owned company, Highways England, on 1 April 2015. As part of this transition, the UK government set out its vision for the future of the English strategic road network in its Road Investment Strategy. A second Road Investment Strategy was published in March 2020, with the company set to invest £27 billion between 2020 and 2025 to improve the network as d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Hain
Peter Gerald Hain, Baron Hain (born 16 February 1950), is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2007 to 2008 and twice as Secretary of State for Wales from 2002 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Neath between 1991 and 2015. Born in Kenya Colony to South African parents, Hain came to the United Kingdom from South Africa as a teenager and was a noted anti-fascist and anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s, and was convicted of criminal conspiracy for leading direct action events. Elected to Parliament at a 1991 by-election, he initially served in Tony Blair's government as a junior minister in the Wales Office, Foreign Office and Department of Trade and Industry. Promoted to the Cabinet as Welsh Secretary in 2002, he served concurrently as Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005 and Northern Ireland Sec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hilary Benn
Hilary James Wedgwood Benn (born 26 November 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Leeds Central since a by-election in 1999. He served in the Cabinet from 2003 to 2010, under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He also served as Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2015 to 2016 and as Chairman of the Brexit Select Committee from 2016 to 2021. Born in Hammersmith, he is the second son of veteran Labour MP Tony Benn and educationalist Caroline Benn. He studied Russian and East European Studies at the University of Sussex and went on to work as a policy researcher for two trade unions, ASTMS and MSF. Benn was elected as a councillor on Ealing Borough Council in 1979 and was Deputy Leader of the Council from 1986 to 1990. He was also the unsuccessful Labour parliamentary candidate for the Ealing North constituency at both the 1983 and 1987 general elections. After the 1997 general election, Benn was appointed as a special adv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay Of Paddington
Margaret Ann Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington, (née Callaghan; born 18 November 1939), is a British politician for the Labour Party and former BBC television producer and presenter. Background Her father was James Callaghan, a Labour politician and prime minister, and she was educated at Blackheath High School, Blackheath and Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1965 and 1977 she held production posts within the BBC, working on current affairs and further education television programmes. She then became a journalist on the BBC's prestigious ''Panorama'' programme, and Thames Television's '' This Week'' and presented the BBC 2 series ''Social History of Medicine''. She has a strong interest in health issues, notably as a campaigner on HIV and AIDS. She was a founder director of the National Aids Trust in 1987 and is also a patron of Help the Aged. Between 1994 and 1997, Baroness Jay was the Chairman of the charity Attend (then National Association of Hospital and Community Frie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
