Jack Straw

John Whitaker Straw (born 3 August 1946) is a British politician who served in the Cabinet from 1997 to 2010 under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He held two of the traditional Great Offices of State, as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, and Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006 under Blair. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Blackburn from 1979 to 2015.

Straw was born in Essex and educated at Oaklands School, where his mother worked as a teacher, and later at Brentwood School. He studied Law at the University of Leeds before having a career as a barrister. He served as an adviser to cabinet minister Barbara Castle and was selected to succeed her as MP for the Blackburn constituency when she stood down at the 1979 United Kingdom general election.

From 2007 to 2010, he served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and the Secretary of State for Justice throughout the Brown ministry. Straw is one of only three individuals to have served in Cabinet continuously during the Labour governments from 1997 to 2010, the others being Brown and Alistair Darling. After the Labour Party lost power in the 2010 United Kingdom general election, he briefly served as Shadow Deputy Prime Minister and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, with the intention of standing down from the frontbench after the subsequent 2010 Labour Party Shadow Cabinet election.

Early life

Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill in Essex, the son of (Walter) Arthur Whitaker Straw—an insurance clerk and salesman and former industrial chemist born at Worsbrough near Barnsley, and raised in Woodford Green—and Joan Sylvia Gilbey, a teacher at the independent Oaklands School, whose father was a Loughton bus mechanic and shop steward, and who was distantly related to the gin-making family.Who's Who 2008, A & C Black, 2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2007
Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor
', Jack Straw, 2012 After his father (with whom, by the time of his death, Straw and his siblings were reconciled) left the family, Straw was raised by his mother on a council estate in Loughton. Known to his family as John, he started calling himself Jack while in school, in reference to Jack Straw, one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Straw is of 1/8th Jewish descent (his maternal grandfather's mother came from an Eastern European Jewish family). He himself is a Christian.

Straw was educated at the school at which his mother taught, Oaklands, and when she left there, at Staples Road Primary School, Loughton, then Brentwood School and the University of Leeds. He graduated with a 2:2 degree in Law. He was alleged by the Foreign Office to have disrupted a student trip to Chile to build a youth centre. They branded him a "troublemaker acting with malice aforethought".

Straw was then elected president of the Leeds University Union, during which time he reluctantly supported a sit-in lasting four days in June 1968. At the 1967 National Union of Students (NUS) Conference, he unsuccessfully ran for office in the NUS. In April 1968 he stood unsuccessfully for election as NUS President, but was defeated by Trevor Fisk. However, he was elected as NUS President in 1969, holding this post until 1971. In 1971, he was elected as a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Islington, a position he held until 1978.

Straw qualified as a barrister at Inns of Court School of Law, practising criminal law for two years from 1972 to 1974. He is a member of The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and remains active in lecturing to fellow members and students. Between 1971 and 1974, Jack Straw was a member of the Inner London Education Authority, and Deputy Leader from 1973 to 1974. He served as a political adviser to Barbara Castle at the Department of Social Security from 1974 to 1976, and as an adviser to Peter Shore at the Department for the Environment from 1976 to 1977. From 1977 to 1979, Straw worked as a researcher for the Granada TV series ''World in Action''.

Member of Parliament from 1979 to 2015

Early parliamentary career (1979–1997)

Straw stood unsuccessfully as the Labour parliamentary candidate for the safe Conservative Tonbridge and Malling constituency in the February 1974 election. In 1977, he was selected to stand for Labour in its safe Blackburn seat at the subsequent general election, after Barbara Castle decided not to seek re-election there. He won the seat at the 1979 general election.

Straw's first Shadow Cabinet post was as Shadow Education Secretary from 1987 to 1992 and he briefly served as Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment under John Smith from 1992 to 1994. When Tony Blair became leader after Smith's death, he chose Straw to succeed him as Shadow Home Secretary. Like Blair, Straw believed Labour's electoral chances had been damaged in the past by the party appearing to be "soft on crime", and he developed a reputation as being even more authoritarian than the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. Straw garnered particular attention for comments condemning "aggressive beggars, winos and squeegee merchants" and calling for a curfew on children.

Home Secretary (1997–2001)

Appointed as Home Secretary after the 1997 general election, he brought forward the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, increased police powers against terrorism and proposed to remove the right to trial by jury in certain cases. These policies won praise from Margaret Thatcher who once declared "I would trust Jack Straw's judgement. He is a very fair man." They were deemed excessively authoritarian by his former students' union, which in 2000 banned him from the building—a policy which lapsed in 2003. However, he also incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, finalising the ''de jure'' abolition of the death penalty with the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998.

In June 1997, Straw appointed Lord Justice Stuart-Smith to conduct a review of the need for a new public inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster. He indicated to the judge at the outset that in the view of his officials "there was not sufficient evidence to justify a new inquiry". In contrast he had told parliament "I am determined to go as far as I can to ensure that no matter of significance is overlooked and that we do not reach a final conclusion without a full and independent examination of the evidence." He had given the families of the victims full assurance that he intended a thorough examination of the matter.
He apologised in both 2012 and 2016 for the failures of his review.

On 31 July 1997, Straw ordered a public inquiry, to be conducted by Sir William Macpherson and officially titled "The Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence". Its report, produced in February 1999, estimated that it had taken "more than 100,000 pages of reports, statements, and other written or printed documents" and concluded that the original Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) investigation had been incompetent and that officers had committed fundamental errors, including: failing to give first aid when they reached the scene; failing to follow obvious leads during their investigation; and failing to arrest suspects. The report found that there had been a failure of leadership by senior MPS officers and that recommendations of the 1981 Scarman Report, compiled following race-related riots in Brixton and Toxteth, had been ignored and concluded that the force was " institutionally racist".
(see also summary: ) It also recommended that the double jeopardy rule should be abrogated in murder cases to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence; this became law in 2005. Straw commented in 2012 that ordering the inquiry was "the single most important decision I made as Home Secretary".

As Home Secretary, Straw was also involved in changing the electoral system for the European Parliament elections from plurality to proportional representation. In doing so, he advocated the use of the d'Hondt formula on the grounds that it produces the most proportional outcomes. The d'Hondt formula, however, is less proportional than the Sainte-Laguë formula which was proposed by the Liberal Democrats. Straw later apologised to the House of Commons for his misleading comments, but the d'Hondt formula stayed in place.

In 1998, Straw declined to pardon the Pendle Witches, hanged in 1612 for committing murder by witchcraft. Defending the decision, his representative stated that it could not be proved that they were innocent of the crime with which they were charged.

In March 2000, Jack Straw was responsible for allowing former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to return to Chile. There were requests from several countries for Pinochet to be extradited and face trial for crimes against humanity. Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Britain while appealing the legal authority of the Spanish and British courts to try him, but Straw eventually ordered his release on medical grounds before a trial could begin, and Pinochet returned to Chile.

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal continued at this time, and according to the Telegraph, Straw had highlighted the problem four years prior to the Jay Report being published, saying there was a "specific problem" in some areas of the country where Pakistani men "target vulnerable young white girls". White girls were, he said, viewed as "easy meat".

Also in 2000, Straw turned down an asylum request from a man fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime, stating "we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven't done anything wrong."

He worried, along with William Hague, about the possibility of English nationalism: "As we move into this new century, people's sense of Englishness will become more articulated and that's partly because of the mirror that devolution provides us with and because we're becoming more European at the same time."

Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary (2001–2006)

Straw was appointed Foreign Secretary in 2001 to succeed Robin Cook. Within months, Straw was confronted by the 11 September attacks in the United States. He was initially seen as taking a back seat to Tony Blair in Her Majesty's Government's prosecution of the "war against terrorism". In late September 2001, he became the first senior British government minister to visit Iran since the 1979 Revolution.

In 2003, the governments of the US and UK agreed a new Extradition Treaty between them, intended to speed up extradition of terrorist suspects. The provisions of the treaty were enacted in the Extradition Act 2003. The treaty later attracted controversy with opponents alleging it to be one-sided: a British request to the USA needed to provide a ''prima facie'' case against a suspect while a US request to Britain needed only to provide reasonable suspicion for an arrest. There have been a series of causes célèbres involving the treaty, including the NatWest Three who later pleaded guilty to fraud against the US parent company of their employers, and Gary McKinnon who admitted hacking US defence computers. An inquiry into extradition arrangements by retired Judge Sir Scott Baker reported in September 2011 that the treaty was not unbalanced and "there is no practical difference between the information submitted to and from the United States".

In a letter to ''The Independent'' in 2004, he claimed that Trotskyists "can usually now be found in the City, appearing on quiz shows or ranting in certain national newspapers," and recommended '' "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder'' by Vladimir Lenin.

In the 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt, Straw was personally informed months in advance of the plans for the takeover attempt and failed to accomplish the duty under international law of alerting the country's government. The involvement of British oil companies in the funding of the coup d'état, and the changing of British citizens evacuation plans for Equatorial Guinea before the attempt, posed serious challenges for the alleged ignorance of the situation. Later on, British officials and Straw were forced to apologise to ''The Observer'' after categorically denying they had prior knowledge of the coup plot.

In the run-up to the 2005 general election, Straw faced a potential backlash from his Muslim constituents over the Iraq War – the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPAC) attempted to capitalise on anti-war sentiment with 'operation Muslim vote' in Blackburn. The swing to the second placed Conservatives was less than 2%, much lower than the national average; the Liberal Democrat's increase in vote share (+12.5%) surpassed Labour's loss (−12.1%) . Craig Murray, who had been withdrawn as the ambassador to Uzbekistan, stood against his former boss (Straw was then Foreign Secretary) on a platform opposing the use of information gathered under torture in the "War on Terror"; he received a 5% vote share. Straw was re-elected, and following his victory called MPAC an "egregious group", and criticised their tactics during the election.

At the 2005 Labour Conference, the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was heckled by Walter Wolfgang, a German Jew who had suffered persecution under the Nazis, and a prominent Labour Party member. At a point when Straw claimed his support for the invasion of Iraq was solely for the purpose of supporting the Iraqi government, 82-year-old Wolfgang was heard to shout "Nonsense", and was forcibly removed from the auditorium by several bouncers. The incident gained considerable publicity, with party chairman Ian McCartney initially supporting the right to remove hecklers by force. McCartney, PM Tony Blair and other senior Labour members later issued apologies; Wolfgang was later elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

On 13 October 2005, Straw took questions from a public panel of individuals in a BBC ''Newsnight'' television special on the subject of Iraq, addressing widespread public concerns about the exit strategy for British troops, the Iraqi insurgency and, inevitably, the moral legitimacy of the war. On several occasions Straw reiterated his position that the decision to invade was in his opinion the right thing to do, but said he did not 'know' for certain that this was the case. He said he understood why public opinion on several matters might differ from his own—a Newsnight/ICM poll showed over 70% of respondents believed the war in Iraq to have increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Britain, but Straw said he could not agree based on the information presented to him.

In February 2006, Straw attracted publicity after he condemned the publication of cartoons picturing Mohammed in the Danish newspaper ''Jyllands-Posten''.

Straw voiced concern over the 2006 Lebanon War. Straw warned that Israel's military action "could further destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation", while noting that "Israel has clear rights to defend itself proportionately".

In August 2006, it was claimed by William Rees-Mogg in ''The Times'' that there was evidence that Straw was removed from this post upon the request of the Bush administration, possibly owing to his expressed opposition to bombing Iran. This would be ironic, as Richard Ingrams in ''The Independent'' wondered whether Straw's predecessor as Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, was also removed at Bush's request, allowing Straw to become Foreign Secretary in the first place. It has also been alleged that another factor in Straw's dismissal was the large number of Muslims amongst his Blackburn constituents, supposedly considered a cause for concern by the US. Some Iranian dissidents mocked Straw as "Ayatollah Straw" after his frequent visits to Tehran in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks.

Straw gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry

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