Richard Corbett
Richard Graham Corbett CBE is a former British politician who served as the final Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, from 2017 to 2020.
He was for decades one of the leading political and academic participants in the debates over British membership of the EU and of reforming the EU. His contributions to reforming the European Parliament were such that a book on prominent British MEPs suggested that "No single MEP did more to significantly increase the powers, standing and efficiency".
He was a Member of the European Parliament for Merseyside West from 1996 to 1999 and then for Yorkshire and the Humber from 1999 to 2009, when he lost his seat, and again from 2014 to 2020. As Labour Leader in the European Parliament, he attended Shadow Cabinet meetings and was a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, where he played a key role in Labour's decision to back a second referendum on Brexit once the actual terms of the Brexit deal were known.
Between January 2010 and February 2014, Corbett was an advisor to the first full-time and long-term President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy. In this capacity, and as a frequent writer and commentator on European affairs, he was voted by a panel of retired diplomats, journalists, academics and think-tankers on 14 November 2012 as the fourth most influential Briton on EU policy, ahead of the Prime Minister.
In 2003, Corbett became the first MEP to write a regular personal blog, and in 2015 he became the first British politician to develop and release a phone app.
Education
Corbett was born in Southport, Lancashire, to parents of working-class background from Wales and London. He attended primary school at Farnborough Road School in Southport. When his father was offered a post as a statistician at the World Health Organization, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and Corbett attended the International School of Geneva, where he obtained the International Baccalaureate. He was captain of the football team and also played for the junior team of a Swiss second division club.He won a place at Trinity College, Oxford, the first generation of his family to be able to go to university, and obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was the Secretary of the Labour Club and chairman of the Oxford Committee for Europe. He co-ordinated the Oxford student 'Yes' campaign in the 1975 referendum on membership of the European Community. He also skied for Oxford against Cambridge.
Corbett later completed a doctorate in political science at the University of Hull.
Political career
Before the European Parliament
Richard Corbett's activities in the European Students at Oxford led on to him being elected first to the youth board of the European Movement in Britain and then to the international presidency of the youth wing of the European Movement and of the Union of European Federalists, the Young European Federalists, a post he held from 1979 to 1981, drafting their manifesto, which was the first to coin the phrase "democratic deficit" in relation to the European Parliament's then lack of power over European legislation.Corbett was secretary-general of the European Co-ordination Bureau of International Non-Governmental Youth Organisations from 1977 to 1981, representing youth organisations in the Council of Europe's European Youth Foundation and European Youth Centre. He also helped to set up the Youth Forum of the European Communities, the predecessor of the European Youth Forum, and represented Western European youth organisations in negotiations with Eastern European organisations pursuant to the Helsinki Treaty. He worked with Altiero Spinelli MEP on the latter's proposal for a draft treaty establishing a European Union, adopted by the European Parliament in 1984.
Before being elected to the European Parliament, Corbett worked in the voluntary sector and as a civil servant, later becoming a policy advisor to and then Deputy Secretary General of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. He worked on drafting the parts of the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam that increased the powers of the Parliament, notably helping to draft the "codecision procedure" which now applies for adopting European legislation through successive readings of the Parliament and the Council.
In 1992, Corbett was made Ambassador of Goodwill of the US State of Arkansas, by its then Governor Bill Clinton.
First Period as a Member of the European Parliament
Corbett was a member of the Parliament's Constitutional Affairs committee and from 1999 to 2009 was the spokesman for the Labour Party, as well as the whole of the wider Group of the Party of European Socialists, on European constitutional affairs. In 2006, he was elected Deputy Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, which he remained until the end of his first period as an MEP, declining to challenge for the leadership when Gary Titley stood down in 2008.In 2003, his proposals to re-write the European Parliament's were largely accepted. In 2004–2005, he was the co-rapporteur for Parliament on the Treaty establishing a constitution for Europe. This report formed the basis of Parliament's official position on the treaty, which he was then invited to present to several national parliaments.
In 2005, he was appointed as Parliament's negotiator to broker a new system of parliamentary scrutiny over Commission implementing measures, which led to an agreement among the Council of ministers, the Commission and the Parliament in 2006 giving Parliament the right to veto quasi-legislative implementing measures. This represented a major increase in Parliament's powers over the Commission.
In 2007–08, he was again co-rapporteur with Iñigo Méndez de Vigo for Parliament on the Treaty of Lisbon, and was again rapporteur for a new overhaul of Parliament's procedures in 2009 and, after his five years out of the Parliament, in 2016 and 2018.
Corbett was a strong advocate of EU reform, with a particular interest in improving democratic accountability by continuing to increase the European Parliament's power within the EU institutional system. Professor Juliet Lodge of Leeds University has named Corbett as one of five "movers and shakers" in the European Parliament who "have brought the European Parliament from being a mere talking shop to a legislature with genuine power".
Corbett's voting record and other parliamentary activities can be found on the VoteWatch website.
Five years out of the European Parliament
Corbett lost his seat in the 2009 European Parliament elections, which saw a big fall in the Labour share of the vote in the wake of the Westminster expenses scandal. The BNP took the seat. The BBC website carried the following comment from their European editor, Mark Mardell:"The saddest moment of the night: Labour MEP Richard Corbett lost his seat. Irrespective of party politics, there are some people who are good for politics as a whole. Mr Corbett, a decent, thoughtful politician, is also one of the few people who understand how the European Parliament actually works and explained it well. He'll be missed on all sides of the chamber".
Mark Mardell had previously referred to Richard Corbett as:
"an example of a conscientious and hard working politician if ever there was one".
After his defeat, Corbett spent two months in Ireland from August to October 2009 helping the "Yes" campaign in the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, in which 67% of the 59% turnout voted in favour.
In December 2009, Corbett was invited to join the private office of the first full-time President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, as his advisor on constitutional issues, but also handling his relations with the European Parliament and national parliaments, with the European Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee as well as helping on relations with some governments, including the UK.
Return to the European Parliament
Corbett left the Van Rompuy cabinet in March 2014, in order to stand for election in the 2014 European Parliament elections as the Labour party's second candidate in Yorkshire & Humber. In Labour's internal ballot of party members to choose their candidates, Corbett came first securing him second spot on the list of Labour candidates, behind the sitting MEP Linda McAvan. Labour won two seats in the election in Yorkshire, and so Corbett was returned to the Parliament.In Parliament, Corbett returned to the Constitutional Committee and served also on the Fisheries Committee and the Economic Committee. He was elected again as Deputy Leader of the Labour MEPs in September 2014. He was again rapporteur for a new overhaul of Parliament's procedures in 2016 and 2018–19. On 25 October 2017 he was elected Leader of the Labour MEPs following the retirement of Glenis Willmott, defeating Siôn Simon and Clare Moody in the vote.
As Leader of the EPLP, Corbett was a member of the Labour Party NEC and attended Shadow Cabinet. In these roles, he was heavily engaged in the internal party discussions that eventually led to Labour calling for a new referendum on Brexit. He spoke at some of the large marches in London and elsewhere calling for a peoples' vote on the final Brexit deal, on the grounds that Brexit was turning out to be very different from what the Leave campaign had promised.
In advance of the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Corbett launched an app called Doorstep EU for IPhone and Android in order to debunk myths about the EU, deliver authoritative briefings on key issues and detailed statistics of the EU's impact on the United Kingdom.
He supported Yvette Cooper in the 2015 Labour Party leadership election, Owen Smith in the 2016 election, and Keir Starmer in the 2020 election.
After Brexit
In 2021-22, the European Parliament asked Corbett to represent it in the Common Secretariat running the Conference on the Future of Europe, while simultaneously being Deputy chef de cabinet to the Secretary General of the European Parliament.In 2023, the S&D Group in the European Parliament asked him to be one of three experts to carry out an independent inquiry into the Qatargate scandal. As the Belgian judicial investigation was still on-going, the inquiry could not trespass on its work, so it instead focussed on weaknesses in the rules and practices of the EU, the European Parliament and the S&D Group that might have made inappropriate interference in the work of the Parliament more easy. Their report made a number of recommendations and those that required changes to the Parliament's Rules of Procedure and the Code of Conduct for Members were subsequently taken up and largely adopted by the Parliament in the autumn of 2023.
Now retired, Corbett has continued to speak and write about European affairs. He authored the primer booklet "The Progressive Potential of the EU" that is being used for training of candidates and activists of the Party of European Socialists in the 2024 European elections.