I first came across the concept of profiling when I was a student teacher working in London Comprehensives Faced with streamed classes of AB and C. I inquired how the streaming was decided. The system was based on profiles sent with each pupil and written up by the previous Primary school deputy head.
There was a clear pattern at Spencer Park Boy’s School, the A Streams were predominantly white with a few Asians. The B stream was mainly Asian. The C stream was all West Inian apart from 2 lower working class white boys who were ripe for the National Front recruiters who hung out outside the school. i am talking 1970s and will write more when my Junius page gets fully underway.
Profiling is now very popular with the British police who have very low detection rates regarding robberies, burglaries and assaults. But that is not there main job anymore. Like , or not, face up to it or not, we have the thought police and profiling is very important to them. That is why Steven Kisko, Stepen Downing and Barry George, to name but a few, were jailed. Colin Stagg was hounded by the press and set up by the police for murdering Rachel Nickel. As with George it did not matter that he was miles away.
Profiling is only used to label the lower orders. Hence allegations against Prince Andrew will disappear, in spite of the aristocracy having a record for taking advantage of lower class women. Police are now very focused on sex offenders and sexual allegations. This is not entirely their fault as feminists and politicians have made it a soft target. No such attention is given to the profiles of our politicians, legal begals, psychiatrists, social workers, media folk and others who patronise and judge those of us who make up the masses.
The recent Supereme Court Ruling is being hailed as a victory for our independent judiciary, so I will start by looking at the social and educsational background of the lead judge in this case, feminist Lady Hales.
EDDIE CHAPMAN
Eddie Chapman was a professional criminal in the years before the Second World War. He was a member of a “jelly gang”, which specialised in robbing safes by blowing them open using the explosive gelignite. His skill as a thief made him a good deal of money and allowed him to live the life of a wealthy playboy in Soho, mixing with the likes of Noel Coward, Ivor Novello and Marlene Dietrich.
By the start of 1939, however, he was being hunted by the police and fled to Jersey. He was caught by the Jersey police in February 1939 after burgling a nightclub and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with an extra year being added on after an attempted escape in September 1939. He remained in prison even after the Germans invaded and occupied the Channel Islands in July 1940, and was finally released in October 1941.
From German agent to double agent
Life on the occupied Channel Islands was harsh, and Chapman sought a way to return to Britain. He volunteered his services to the Germans as a spy and was eventually accepted by the German secret service, the Abwehr. The Abwehr was in a desperate position; it was getting only very low-quality intelligence out of Britain from its network of spies there. (In fact, though the Abwehr was unaware of this, MI5 had already caught almost all of the German spies in the UK and recruited several of them as double agents.)
Eddie Chapman
The Abwehr saw Chapman as an ideal candidate for a spy. He claimed to be hostile to the British state, not least because he was still wanted by the police for his crimes on the UK mainland. His connections with the criminal underworld offered the possibility that he could recruit additional agents for the Germans, and his expertise with explosives would enable him to carry out acts of sabotage. In particular, the Germans wanted him to attack the De Havilland aircraft factory in Hertfordshire, which made the much-feared Mosquito bomber.
After a year’s training in German-occupied France, Chapman was dropped by parachute into a field in Cambridgeshire on 16 December 1942. Instead of disappearing into the criminal underworld, as his German handlers intended, he promptly turned himself in to the police and MI5. His arrival was expected; unknown to him or the Germans, the British had cracked the Germans’ secret codes and knew in advance when agent “Fritzchen” (“little Fritz”), the Germans’ codename for Chapman, would be dropped into the UK.
Chapman was taken to a secret MI5 detention centre in west London known as Camp 020. He was interrogated by the formidable Lt Col Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, who owed his nickname to the steel-rimmed monocle which he wore at all times (even, it was said, in bed). Chapman was fully willing to cooperate: he told his interrogators everything about his time in occupied France and the mission that the Germans had given him. He even volunteered to work for the British against the Germans. Although Chapman’s criminal past was a cause for concern, Stephens concluded:
“In our opinion, Chapman should be used to the fullest extent… he genuinely means to work for the British against the Germans. By his courage and resourcefulness he is ideally fitted to be an agent.”
Eddie Chapman thus became Agent ZIGZAG, one of the most important British double agents of the Second World War. MI5 decided to re-infiltrate Chapman into Germany and obtain more information about the Abwehr. Under the supervision of an MI5 officer, Chapman made radio contact with the Germans and informed them that he was preparing to carry out his sabotage mission at the De Havilland factory. He was sent to the factory at Hatfield, along with an MI5 minder, to work out a plan of attack so that he could tell his German controllers later what he had done.
Faking sabotage
The “attack” itself was one of the most remarkable deception operations of the Second World War. During the night of 29/30 January 1943, an elaborate system of camouflage was installed at the De Havilland factory to make it appear to German reconnaissance aircraft that a very large bomb had exploded inside the factory’s power plant. Bomb-damaged transformers were created out of wood and papier-mache, and buildings were disguised with tarpaulins and corrugated iron sheets painted to appear from the air as if they were the half-demolished remains of walls and roofs. Rubble and debris was spread around the power plant, to make it appear as if it had been thrown there by an explosion. Separately, MI5 arranged for a fake story to be planted in the Daily Express reporting “an explosion at a factory on the outskirts of London.”
The ruse was a complete success, even deceiving the factory’s own staff. Chapman radioed the Germans to inform them of the successful “demolition” of the factory’s power plant. The Abwehr was delighted with Chapman’s work. In March 1943 he returned via neutral Portugal to Germany and travelled on to an Abwehr safe house in German-occupied Norway. To his amazement, he was awarded Germany’s highest honour, the Iron Cross, in recognition of his work for the Abwehr. He was, and remains, the only British citizen ever to have been awarded this medal.
Chapman returned to Britain in June 1944 and survived the war, later publishing an account of his exploits in three books: The Eddie Chapman Story (1953), Free Agent: The Further Adventures of Eddie Chapman (1955) and The Real Eddie Chapman Story (1966). His story has also been told in two books published in 2007, Zigzag – The incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman by Nicholas Booth, and Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman, Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy, by Ben Macintyre. MI5’s files on Chapman were released to The National Archives in 2001 following his death in 1997, and can be viewed by anyone with a National Archives readers’ ticket. Source /www.mi5.gov.uk/eddie-chapman
Terence Ellis “Terry” Lloyd (21 November 1952 – 22 March 2003) was an English television journalist who reported extensively from the Middle East. He was killed by the U.S. military while covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq for ITN. An inquest jury in the United Kingdom before Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker returned a verdict of unlawful killing on 13 October 2006 following an eight-day hearing.
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Saddam Hussein
president of Iraq Written By:
Last Updated: Jan 9, 2020 See Article HistoryAlternative Titles: Ṣaddām Ḥusayn, Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti
Saddam Hussein, also spelled Ṣaddām Ḥusayn, in full Ṣaddām Ḥusayn al-Tikrītī, (born April 28, 1937, Al-ʿAwjah, Iraq—died December 30, 2006, Baghdad), president of Iraq (1979–2003) whose brutal rule was marked by costly and unsuccessful wars against neighbouring countries.Top Questions
When did Saddam Hussein die?
Where did Saddam Hussein grow up?
How did Saddam Hussein influence the world?
Early life
Saddam, the son of peasants, was born in a village near the city of Tikrīt in northern Iraq. The area was one of the poorest in the country, and Saddam himself grew up in poverty. His father died before he was born, and he went at an early age to live with an uncle in Baghdad.
He joined the Baʿth Party in 1957. In 1959 he participated in an unsuccessful attempt by Baʿthists to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister, ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim; Saddam was wounded in the attempt and escaped first to Syria and then to Egypt. He attended Cairo Law School (1962–63) and continued his studies at Baghdad Law College after the Baʿthists took power in Iraq in 1963. The Baʿthists were overthrown that same year, however, and Saddam spent several years in prison in Iraq. He escaped, becoming a leader of the Baʿth Party, and was instrumental in the coup that brought the party back to power in 1968. Saddam effectively held power in Iraq along with the head of state, Pres. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, and in 1972 he directed the nationalization of Iraq’s oil industry.
Presidency
Saddam began to assert open control of the government in 1979 and became president upon Bakr’s resignation. He then became chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and prime minister, among other positions. He used an extensive secret-police establishment to suppress any internal opposition to his rule, and he made himself the object of an extensive personality cult among the Iraqi public. His goals as president were to supplant Egypt as leader of the Arab world and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Subscribe today
Saddam launched an invasion of Iran’s oil fields in September 1980, but the campaign bogged down in a war of attrition. The cost of the war and the interruption of Iraq’s oil exports caused Saddam to scale down his ambitious programs for economic development. The Iran-Iraq War dragged on in a stalemate until 1988, when both countries accepted a cease-fire that ended the fighting. Despite the large foreign debt with which Iraq found itself saddled by war’s end, Saddam continued to build up his armed forces.
In August 1990 the Iraqi army overran neighbouring Kuwait. Saddam apparently intended to use that nation’s vast oil revenues to bolster Iraq’s economy, but his occupation of Kuwait quickly triggered a worldwide trade embargo against Iraq. He ignored appeals to withdraw his forces from Kuwait, despite the buildup of a large U.S.-led military force in Saudi Arabia and the passage of United Nations (UN) resolutions condemning the occupation and authorizing the use of force to end it. The Persian Gulf War began on January 16, 1991, and ended six weeks later when the allied military coalition drove Iraq’s armies out of Kuwait. Iraq’s crushing defeat triggered internal rebellions by both Shiʿis and Kurds, but Saddam suppressed their uprisings, causing thousands to flee to refugee camps along the country’s northern border. Untold thousands more were murdered, many simply disappearing into the regime’s prisons.
As part of the cease-fire agreement with the UN, Iraq was prohibited from producing or possessing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Numerous sanctions were leveled on the country pending compliance, and those caused severe disruption of the economy. Saddam’s continued refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspectors led to a four-day air strike by the United States and Great Britain in late 1998 (Operation Desert Fox). Both countries announced that they would support efforts of the Iraqi opposition to unseat Saddam, whose regime had grown increasingly brutal under UN sanctions, but the Iraqi leader barred UN weapons inspectors from entering his country. In the interim it became clear that Saddam was grooming one of his sons—Uday or Qusay—to succeed him. Both were elevated to senior positions, and both mirrored the brutality of their father. Moreover, Saddam continued to solidify his control at home, while he struck a profoundly defiant and anti-American stance in his rhetoric. Though increasingly feared at home, Saddam was viewed by many in the Arab world as the only regional leader willing to stand up to what they saw as American aggression.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, the U.S. government, asserting that Saddam might provide terrorist groups with chemical or biological weapons, sought to renew the disarmament process. Though Saddam allowed UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq in November 2002, his failure to cooperate fully with the investigations frustrated the United States and Great Britain and led them to declare an end to diplomacy. On March 17, 2003, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush ordered Saddam to step down from office and leave Iraq within 48 hours or face war; he also indicated that, even if Saddam left the country, U.S. forces might be needed to stabilize the new government and search for weapons of mass destruction. When Saddam refused to leave, U.S. and allied forces launched an attack on Iraq on March 20.
The opening salvo of the Iraq War was an assault by U.S. aircraft on a bunker complex in which Saddam was thought to be meeting with subordinates. Although the attack failed to kill the Iraqi leader, subsequent attacks directed against Saddam made it clear that eliminating him was a major goal of the invasion. Always obstinate in his tone, Saddam exhorted Iraqis to lay down their lives to stop U.S. and British forces, but resistance to the invasion soon crumbled, and on April 9, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. soldiers, Saddam fled into hiding. He took with him the bulk of the national treasury and was initially able to evade capture by U.S. troops. His sons, Uday and Qusay, were cornered and killed in Mosul on July 22, but it was not until December 13 that Saddam was finally captured. The once dapper leader was pulled, disheveled and dirty, from a small underground hiding place near a farmhouse in the vicinity of Tikrīt. Although he was armed, Saddam surrendered to U.S. soldiers without firing a shot.
Trial and execution
In October 2005 Saddam went on trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal, a panel court established to try officials of the former Iraqi government. He and several codefendants were charged with the killing of 148 townspeople in Al-Dujayl, a mainly Shiʿi town, in 1982. Throughout the nine-month trial, Saddam interrupted the proceedings with angry outbursts, claiming that the tribunal was a sham and that U.S. interests were behind it. The tribunal finally adjourned in July 2006 and handed down its verdicts in November. Saddam was convicted of crimes against humanity—including willful killing, illegal imprisonment, deportation, and torture—and was sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam’s half brother (an intelligence officer) and Iraq’s former chief judge were also sentenced to death. Days after an Iraqi court upheld his sentence in December 2006, Saddam was executed.The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Zeidan, Assistant Editor.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
- Iraq: Iraq under Saddam Hussein From the early 1970s Saddam was widely recognized as the power behind President al-Bakr, who after 1977 was little more than a figurehead. Saddam reached this position through his leadership of the internal security apparatus, a post that most senior Baʿthist figures had been…
- United States: The George W. Bush administration …world attention on Iraq, accusing Saddam Hussein’s government of having ties to al-Qaeda and of continuing to possess and develop weapons of mass destruction, contrary to UN mandates. In November Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, engineered a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq.…
- United Kingdom: Weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq War …power the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which was alleged to either possess or be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that might either be used against Iraq’s neighbours or find their way into the hands of international terrorists. Notwithstanding widespread and enormous public protests against war, the resignation of…
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Saddam Hussein
Quick Facts
View Media Page
bornApril 28, 1937
Al-ʿAwjah, Iraq
diedDecember 30, 2006 (aged 69)
Baghdad, Iraq
title / office
political affiliation
role in
notable family members
- son Uday Hussein
- son Qusay Hussein
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Nick Robinson BBC
Nicholas Anthony Robinson (born 5 October 1963) is a British journalist, currently a presenter on the BBC‘s Today programme. Prior to this he spent ten years as political editor for the BBC, and he has had many other roles with the broadcaster.
Robinson was interested in politics from an early age. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, where he was also President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Starting out in broadcasting at Piccadilly Radio, after a year as President of the Conservative Party youth group, he worked his way up as a producer, eventually becoming deputy editor of Panorama before becoming a political correspondent in 1996.
He became the BBC’s chief political correspondent in 1999. Between 2002 and 2005, he worked for ITV News as political editor, but then returned to the BBC assuming the same role.
Known for his confrontational and provocative approach,
Robinson was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, on 5 October 1963, to a translator mother and a sales director father. His mother was born in Shanghai, to where her German-Jewish parents fled during the 1930s. His father was of English background.[1][2][3] His parents first met at Geneva University in Switzerland, and married three months later.[2]
Robinson was interested in political journalism from the age of eight.[4] He was educated at Cheadle Hulme School and University College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.[5]
Whilst travelling in Europe in 1982, he survived a car crash in Lille, France, in which the car, a two-door Volkswagen Beetle, exploded; his friends James Nelson and Will Redhead (son of Brian Redhead, an earlier presenter of Today on BBC Radio 4) were killed.[6] Robinson was “severely burned”,[4] spent five weeks in hospital and had to defer his university place.[6] Brian Redhead became Robinson’s mentor, and later encouraged his career in political journalism, giving him a copy of Tony Benn‘s Arguments for Socialism for his birthday. However, Robinson’s early political affiliations were to the right.[4]
Political activism
Robinson was a founder-member of Macclesfield Young Conservatives (YC) and rose through the ranks, becoming Cheshire YC Chairman from 1982 to 1984 and became a key activist in the moderate-controlled North West Area organisation. Philip Pedley, as National YC Chairman, co-opted Robinson onto the YC National Advisory Committee in 1983 and appointed him National Campaign Director of Youth for Multilateral Disarmament. Robinson was elected National Vice Chairman from 1985 to 1987 and succeeded a fellow moderate, Richard Fuller, when Robinson was elected Chairman of the National Young Conservatives on the moderate ticket against strong right-wing opposition (1987–1988).[7]
At university he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1985.[8][9]
Walllace Shawn, posted for my benefit. I am a fan -of ‘Young Sheldon’ and Shawn, my kind of playwright. Posted by Robert Cook November 15th 2019
Wallace Shawn, (born November 12, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.), American playwright and character actor whose oft-surreal probing plays found favour in the British theatre and led some to call him the leading contemporary dramatist in the United States.
Shawn was exposed to New York City’s literary culture from a young age, as his father, William Shawn, was the editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. He studied history at Harvard University and then philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, before turning to playwriting after returning to New York. His first produced work was Our Late Night, which premiered in 1975 and won an Obie Award for playwriting. Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts—featuring a prolonged simulated orgy in the second act—was met with parliamentary protests when it debuted in London in 1977 and was subsequently pulled from the theatre, which helped forge his reputation as a risk-taking playwright. In 1979 he made his on-screen acting debut with a small role in director Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and his “second career” soon led to his first brush with international fame.
Shawn and fellow actor-writer André Gregory starred in the film My Dinner with André (1981), which was an art-house sensation upon its release and became a cult classic in later years. The movie re-created a real-life dinner between the two principals, and the plot simply consisted of a long, meandering philosophical conversation, unusual subject matter for a modest box-office hit. Shawn went on to have memorable roles in four more Allen movies and in such films as The Princess Bride (1987), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), and Clueless (1995). In 2013 Shawn wrote and starred in A Master Builder, the film adaptation of Henrick Ibsen’s play of the same name (1892). He then appeared in the movies Admission (2013), Maggie’s Plan (2015), The Only Living Boy in New York (2017), and Book Club (2018).
Throughout his career, Shawn acted on television as well, including a recurring role on the 1996–97 Clueless spin-off. He assumed guest roles on numerous shows, notably Murphy Brown in 1994–97, Sex and the City in 2004, The Good Wife in 2013–15, and Mozart in the Jungle in 2014–18. Get unlimited access to all of Britannica’s trusted content. Start Your Free Trial Today
Shawn’s distinctive voice also lent itself well to a number of family movies, including four Toy Story films (1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019), The Incredibles (2004), Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010), and Penguin Monster Beach Party (2015) and its sequels.
Meanwhile, Shawn produced highly lauded dramas. Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) won him a second Obie Award, and he took a third in 1991 for The Fever, a caustic 90-minute monologue that dissects the power relations between the world’s poor and elite classes and finds a pervasive moral deficiency in the latter. The Designated Mourner (1996; film 1997) touched on similar ground, telling the story—through actionless narrations by the three characters—of educated and privileged people who grapple with their humanity during a chaotic civil war in an unnamed country.
In 2009 London’s Royal Court Theatre staged a three-month festival of Shawn’s work, including the premiere of his first new play in more than 10 years, Grasses of a Thousand Colors. He subsequently debuted his play Evening at the Talk House in London in 2015.
In addition to acting and playwriting, Shawn published the nonfiction collections Essays (2009) and Night Thoughts (2017).
Suzanne Moore Profile Posted October 27th 2019
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search For other people with similar names, see Sue Moore and Susan Moore.
| Suzanne Moore | |
|---|---|
| Born | Suzanne Lynn Moore 17 July 1958 (age 61) Ipswich, Suffolk, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Years active | 1980–present |
| Children | 3 daughters |
| Suzanne Moore’s voice Menu0:00 Recorded November 2012 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman’s HourProblems playing this file? See media help. |
Suzanne Lynn Moore (born 17 July 1958 in Ipswich, Suffolk)[1] is an English journalist.
Contents
Early life and education
Moore is the daughter of an American father and a working-class British mother, who split up during her childhood.[1] She attended an all-girls grammar school, and left at 16.[1]
After various jobs in Britain and overseas, including waitressing, shop work and door to door sales, Moore embarked on a psychology degree at Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University), but soon switched to cultural studies. She began a PhD and journalism career simultaneously after graduation, but ceased work on her doctorate after 18 months.[1]
Journalism career
During her career Moore has written for Marxism Today,[2] The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, and the New Statesman. In The Guardian in 1995, Moore falsely stated that Germaine Greer had undergone a hysterectomy at 25. Greer responded by accusing Moore of possessing “hair bird’s-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage.”[3]
In January 2013, a “throwaway” comment in an essay by Moore, which had been reprinted by the New Statesman,[4] was criticised on Twitter as transphobic, to which she responded. Her response led to a larger row involving wider sections of the transfeminist and radical feminist blogosphere, and after her friend Julie Burchill came to her defence in an opinion piece in The Observer, which was widely criticised[by whom?] as hate speech and withdrawn by the paper the following day,[5][6] the row expanded to much of the British press.[7]
In June 2019, Moore wrote in an article entitled ‘Why is it so hard for Labour to find a woman to be leader?’, that Corbyn was “not concerned enough to actually have many (women in the Labour leadership)” and that “Labour has a shortage of women, not on its benches but in its inner circle.”[8] Commentators pointed out that 15 members, i.e. around half, of the Shadow Cabinet were women, and suggested that Moore had ignored these largely working class, northern, left-wing and Black women and that her motive in writing the article was to promote as potential replacements for Corbyn two MPs that she did note, Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips.[9]
Politics
Moore stood as an independent candidate for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington in the 2010 UK general election[1] due to her disillusionment with the main political parties. She finished sixth with 0.6% of the vote, losing to Diane Abbott[10] and forfeiting her deposit.
Personal life
Moore has lived in the Hackney area since the early 1990s, and is a single mother. She has three daughters from various relationships.[1]
References
Cochrane, Kira (30 April 2010). “Suzanne Moore: ‘Vote for me, I’m flawed'”. The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Moore, Suzanne (23 July 2015). “When I worked at Marxism Today, my desire to earn a living proved to be somewhat déclassé”. New Statesman. Progressive Media International. Retrieved 24 July 2015. Thackray, Rachelle (21 February 1999). “Germaine smacks her sisters”. The Independent. ESI Media. Moore, Suzanne (8 January 2013). “Seeing red: the power of female anger”. New Statesman. Progressive Media International. We
[women]
are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual. Krase, Jennifer C. (19 January 2013). “Suzanne Moore: timeline of trans-misogynistic twitter rant (with tweets)”. Storify. Archived from the original on 22 January 2013.
Hilary Benn Posted October 15th 2019
Hilary is the Labour Member of Parliament for Leeds Central. Previously, he served as International Development Secretary, as a Minister in the Home Office, as Secretary of State at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, the Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and the Shadow Foreign Secretary. He was elected Chair of the Exiting the European Union Select Committee in October 2016.
Hilary’s Background
Hilary was born in London in 1953 to Tony and Caroline Benn. He attended Holland Park Comprehensive School and Sussex University. A former President of Ealing Acton Constituency Labour Party, he was elected to Ealing Borough Council in 1979 at the age of 25, becoming Chair of the Education Committee in 1986. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Group for nine years and was Deputy Leader of the Council from 1986-1990. In 1988 he was elected Chair of the Association of London Authorities Education Committee. He was also a member of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities Education Committee and the Labour Party’s Education Forum.
Labour and the Trade Unions
In 1980, while a Research Officer with the Association of Scientific, Technical and Management Staffs, Hilary was seconded to the Labour Party to act as Joint Secretary to the finance panel of the Labour Party Commission of Inquiry.
In 1982, at the age of 29, he was selected as Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Ealing North, which he contested in the 1983 and 1987 General Elections.
In 1993, he was appointed as Head of Research at Manufacturing, Science, Finance – Britain’s fifth largest trade union – and in 1996 was promoted to the post of Head of Policy and Communications. He represented MSF on the Labour Party’s National Policy Forum, was an elected member of the Party’s Environment Policy Commission and a member of the Labour Party into Power Taskforce on party democracy. He also gave evidence to the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life.
From 1994 to 1999, he was Chair of the Management Committee of Unions 21 – the trade union think tank.
Work as a Special Adviser
Following Labour’s 1997 General Election victory, Hilary was appointed as special adviser to the Rt Hon David Blunkett MP, then Secretary of State for Education and Employment. His responsibilities included lifelong learning, and he was closely involved in the drafting of the Learning Age green paper and the Learning to Succeed White Paper. He was also instrumental in setting up the highly-successful Union Learning Fund
Into Parliament as MP for Leeds Central
In June 1999, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Leeds Central, succeeding the late Derek Fatchett. Hilary has established a reputation as a hard-working and approachable MP who fights hard for his constituents. He does regular advice surgeries and supports a number of local community organisations. He is a Patron of Caring Together in Woodhouse and Little London, Holbeck Elderly Aid, St Vincent Support Centre, the First Floor Project, Leeds Development Education Centre, Hunslet Hawks RLFC, the Ciaran Bingham Foundation Trust, Arts@ Trinity, Rosebank Millennium Green, Friends of PHAB, Faith Together in Leeds 11, St Luke’s Cares, STOP, Education South Africa, The Forgotten Heroes, Leeds Groundwork and the Hamara Centre.
Ministerial Career
June 2001, Hilary was appointed as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development. Between May 2002 and May 2003, he was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Community and Custodial provision at the Home Office.
In May 2003 he was appointed as Minister of State for International Development and in October that year entered the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development. While at DFID, Hilary played an important part in increasing the UK’s aid budget and in winning agreement on debt relief for the poorest countries at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit. He oversaw the UK’s response to the South-East Asian Tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake, and it was his idea that resulted in the establishment of the UN central emergency relief fund which now helps the world to respond better to disasters. He also led the UK negotiating team at the 2006 Darfur peace negotiations.
Hilary was appointed to DEFRA as Secretary of State in 2007, when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. At DEFRA, he helped to put the ground-breaking Climate Change Act on the statute book, and piloted the Marine and Coastal Access Act – which will protect out marine ecosystems – into law. He also created the South Downs National Park.
Following the 2010 General Election Hilary became Shadow Leader of the House of Commons before being appointed as Shadow Secretary of State for the Department of Communities and Local Government in October 2011. He was then appointed Shadow Foreign Secretary following the 2015 General Election.
In October 2016 Hilary was elected as Chair of the newly formed Exiting the European Union Committee.
More About Sophie Ridge Septmber 29th 2019
Ridge was born on 17 October 1984 in Richmond upon Thames, London.[1][2] Both her parents are teachers. Ridge has one younger brother.[2] Her secondary education was at the selective grammar Tiffin Girls’ School in London. During her time there, she did work experience at the newspaper Richmond and Twickenham Times. She continued her education at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where Ridge obtained a second-class BA degree in English Literature. During her time at university Ridge joined the Oxford University Music Society (OUMS) and had classical training in singing and considered pursuing a musical career, but she was later persuaded to pursue a journalism career. [3] During her final year of university she did a period of work experience at the tabloid newspaper News of the World, which led to a position on their graduate training programme.[2]
Career
After graduation in 2006, Ridge was a trainee reporter at the tabloid newspaper News of the World.[4] After completion of her training programmes she initially worked as a consumer affairs correspondent in 2009. She then gained a job as a political correspondent on Sky News in 2011.[3][5][6] During her time there she covered a broad range of political stories and travelled with the Prime Minister to Afghanistan, New York, and Brazil. She was based in Colorado for the channel’s coverage of the US elections and was known for her round the clock broadcasting at the annual party conferences.
Ridge covered the 2015 general election as a senior political correspondent for Sky News, reporting on the Labour Party‘s campaign and conducting interviews with party members. Her exclusives during this time included Ed Miliband‘s resignation as leader of the Labour Party following the result of that general election and Jeremy Corbyn‘s victory in the subsequent Labour Party leadership election.[2]
In 2017 Ridge became the host of her own show Sophy Ridge on Sunday.[6][7] In the same year Ridge released her first book The Women Who Shaped Politics, a non-fiction book which discussed women’s contribution to British politics.[8]
She currently has a weekly column in the newspaper Metro.[citation needed]
Political views
Ridge claims that the U.S. public’s rejection of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election was due to sexism. She states: “To put it bluntly: women can be sexist too… There are plenty of women who think mothers should stay at home to raise a family, believe girls wear pink and play with dolls and secretly would feel a little bit safer if they knew a man was flying their plane.”
She adds: “Sexism is insidious, unconscious and affects women as well as men. Just because women didn’t turn out in big enough numbers for Mrs Clinton does not mean we should dismiss the troubling sexism and misogyny that marred the campaign… The fact so many women in America voted for Mr Trump over Mrs Clinton is a get-out-of-jail-free card: female voters weren’t bothered, so it can’t be sexist. It can, and it is.”[9]
Sophie Ridge Posted September 2019
Sophy Ridge is an English broadcast journalist. She is well known for her work at the newspapers and most particularly for her work in the Sky News where she works as the Senior Political Correspondent.
Sophy Ridge: Childhood, Education, and Family
Sophy Ridge was born in Richmond upon the Thames, London on October 17, 1984, there is no information about her family. Also, there is no information regarding her siblings. She belongs to British nationality and English ethnicity. Her birth sign is Libra. Talking about her education, firstly, she attended Tiffin Girls’ School. Then, she attended St Edmund Hall.
Sophy Ridge: Early Professional Career
On talking about her profession, she began her career as a trainee reporter for the tabloid newspaper News of the World after her graduation in 2006 where she worked as a consumer affairs correspondent at the beginning.
Similarly, she also worked as a journalist on the sky news in 2011. Likewise, her work was highly appreciated as she was made to travel a lot and report a huge amount of political stories from across the world.
Whereas, she also visited places like Afghanistan, New York, and Brazil with the Prime Minister. At present, she is a host on her show Sophy Ridge on Sunday.
moreover, her highest profile was in 2015 as she also played a key role in the 2015 general election coverage for Sky, reporting on the Labour Party’s campaign and conducting interviews with party members.
Sophy Ridge: Lifetime Achievements and Awards
On talking about her lifetime achievements and awards, she is a winner of several awards one of them is the Headline money rising star award. She has also won MHP 30 Under 30 Gold Award, Total Politics Blog Awards 2011, Young Journalist of the Year in the Royal Television Society Awards in 2013, etc.
Sophy Ridge: Rumors and controversy
Sophy goofed up while introducing the leader, Kezia Dugdale of Scottish Labour Party by saying Scottish Labia Party. She was red-faced after making the blunder. However, she corrected soon but the clip was viral all over the social media.
Sophy Ridge: Salary and Net Worth
On talking about her salary and net worth, her salary and net worth are disclosed.
The Guardian profile: Lady Brenda Hale
The new – and youngest – law lord is a self-confessed feminist, a breaker of tradition by taking an unusual route to the top and a totemic hate figure for the Daily Mail, which accuses her of subverting family values
Clare Dyer, legal Correspondent
Fri 9 Jan 2004 15.18 GMT First published on Fri 9 Jan 2004 15.18 GMT
Shares 19 These are unsettling times for the law lords, the 12 judges who make up Britain’s highest court. The radical lord chancellor, Charlie Falconer, is hell-bent on turning them out of the Palace of Westminster and setting them up as the country’s first supreme court by the end of the year, even though he has not yet found a new home for them.
And to top it all, next Monday the first woman to join their ranks – a self-confessed feminist who has declared that she wants “to see changes in the way society is organised, rather than wanting women to conform to male-determined roles” – takes up her post.
Brenda Hale will be just one of 12, but she represents a whirlwind of change for a body preserved for decades as one of the most homogeneous organs of the British establishment. Not only will she be the youngest law lord, at 59 this month, she will be the first ever to have given birth and juggled the demands of work and childcare.
Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate – sent direct to you
An academic who spent 18 years teaching law at Manchester University, she has not come up through the traditional route of years at practice at the bar. And she will be the first family lawyer in many years to sit in the court – top judges have traditionally emerged from the more ‘heavyweight’ areas of commercial and chancery law.
She also brings a knowledge rare among judges of the workings of Whitehall and the ins and outs of the legislative process from her 10 years on the Law Commission, including five years working closely with officials from two departments on the gestation of the ground-breaking Children Act.
It was at the Law Commission, the reform quango, that Hale first became a totemic hate figure for the Daily Mail. From 1984 until she was appointed a high court judge in 1994 she presided over a far-reaching revamp of family law which included no-fault divorce – later so savaged in the parliamentary process that it became unworkable and was jettisoned by the last lord chancellor, Derry Irvine – and the right of unmarried victims of domestic violence to stay in their homes.
In a vitriolic attack the Mail dubbed Hale – then known as Brenda Hoggett from her marriage to her first husband, the Manchester QC John Hoggett – and her four fellow law commissioners “legal commissars subverting family values”. It went on to note that she had married a fellow law commissioner, Julian Farrand, only nine days after her divorce and 10 days after his. A draft bill for which she was responsible, on decision-making for mentally incapacitated people, was wrongly portrayed by the tabloid as advocating legalised euthanasia and organ-snatching.
The Mail was back on the attack when her appointment as the first woman law lord was announced in October, demonising her as a “hardline feminist” whose appointment “epitomises the moral vacuum within our judiciary and wider establishment”.
Hale’s friends are bemused by the coldly logical, doctrinaire and supercilious persona painted by the Mail and its distance from the reality. “Brenda is an absolutely straightforward, completely honest and principled person,” said the Labour peer Helena Kennedy QC. “This idea of a man-hating feminist is wrong. She’s extraordinarily human, by no means anti-male and great fun. I’ve always found her a wonderful, companionable person.”
Hale admits being a “softline” feminist who believes in equality for men and women. Growing up in Yorkshire, one of three daughters of a boys’ school headteacher and a mother who later became head of a primary school, she couldn’t help noticing that there were only half as many grammar school places for girls as for boys. At Cambridge, where she took a starred first and was top of her class, the women’s colleges supplied only six of the more than 100 law students: in effect a quota on women.
In 1966, after graduation, she joined the Manchester University law faculty as a junior lecturer. While teaching she studied for the bar exams, winning the top results for her year in the bar finals. She initially managed to combine teaching with work at the bar until, required to choose between the two, she opted for academe. The person who forced her to make the choice was Julian Farrand, dean of the law faculty.
She and Farrand, both then married to others, moved to the Law Commission in London at the same time in 1984. Their relationship developed later: in 1994 she told a legal journal that she and her first husband ” grew apart” when she went south with their daughter Julia, then aged 11 and now a 30-year-old merchant banker.
Farrand, she added, “likes to say it took 20 years to fall in love at first sight”. Both went through amicable divorces which were finalised just before they married in 1992. Nine years her senior, Farrand went on to become the pensions ombudsman and insurance ombudsman, and to write a farcical novel Love at All Risks, the confessions of an insurance ombudsman who has “a passionate adulterous affair” with his “stunning assistant”.
The couple remain “immensely solid and happy together”, according to Mavis Maclean of the Oxford University centre for family law and policy, who has known Hale for 30 years. Both were working mothers in the 70s, when they were among a group of academics who looked at law for the first time in the context of society and how the laws impacted on women’s lives.
The influential 1984 book Women and the Law, the first comprehensive survey of women’s rights at work, in the family and in the state, which Hale wrote with a fellow academic, concluded: “Deep-rooted problems of inequality persist and the law continues to reflect the economic, social and political dominance of men.”
On the bench Hale has criticised the inbuilt bias of the current system for choosing judges, with its dependence on “soundings” from those already there, producing a judiciary which is “not only mainly male, overwhelmingly white, but also largely the product of a limited range of educational institutions and social backgrounds”.
On one occasion,”deeply affronted”, she refused to withdraw with the women after a dinner at the lodgings where judges stay on circuit, because she felt it was “quite insulting” to the female junior barrister who was a guest.
Male judges, she remarked last October, were “very welcoming, very friendly, lovely people to work with. The only comment one would make is that they tend to be of an age and background where they have very rarely had a woman as an equal colleague as opposed to a secretary, clerk or whatever. So they are sometimes nonplussed”.
All agree she is formidably clever, with a wide knowledge of the law, yet one retired law lord confided: “She’s a bloody awful judge, you know.” Another judge reckoned that while she had not been a particularly good judge in the high court, she had performed well in the court of appeal.
Sir Thomas Legg, who was permanent secretary at the lord chancellor’s department when Hale was first appointed to the high court in 1994, says the latter comment has been repeated about “quite a few distinguished judges over the ages”. He attributes such remarks not so much to gender bias as to most judges’ firm belief that only those who have spent years toiling as courtroom advocates can make good judges, at least below the appeal court level.
Legg acknowledged that Hale’s gender was a factor in helping her reach the top court, but added: “She would have got there on merit. She’s a very able person with a particularly clear intelligence. Her ability has always shone out.”
Jane Hoyal, a family law barrister and chairwoman of the association of women barristers – of which Hale is president – has observed her on the bench since she was a part-time deputy high court judge. “What was outstanding was her empathy with clients.”
Andrew Burrows, now a law professor at Oxford University and a junior colleague of Hale’s at Manchester in the 80s, says: “Her judgments are basically good and always interesting to read. She was always fantastic to talk law to because she was always so clear in her thinking.” He also praises, as do others who have worked with her, her willingness to encourage younger colleagues.
“She’s moved the law on for the benefit of children quite significantly, particularly in the area of human rights, about which she appears to feel deeply,” said child law expert Allan Levy QC.
In the new era of the supreme court, Hale’s broader background will be a great asset, argues Peter Graham Harris, a former senior civil servant in the lord chancellor’s department who worked with her on the Children Act. “The great thing is her academic background which allows her to see things in broader social policy terms, and her experience in Whitehall,” he said. “All that is going to be very important to the senior judiciary because they’re going to play a much larger part in the governance of the nation.”
Life in short: Lady Brenda Hale
Born January 31 1945
Education Richmond high school for girls; Cambridge University
Family Married with one daughter
Career Manchester University: assistant lecturer in law,1966; lecturer, 1968; senior lecturer, 1976; reader, 1981; professor, 1986-89. Called to the bar, 1969; barrister, northern circuit, 1969-72; appointed Queen’s Counsel, 1989; recorder, 1989-94; judge of the high court, family division, 1994-99; lord justice of appeal, 1999-2003
Brenda Hale on life
“The most troubling aspect of my perception is that some women are being pursued and oppressed by controlling or vengeful men with the full support of the system”
