Jack Straw
John Whitaker Straw 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 for Blackburn from 1979 to 2015.
Straw was born in Essex and privately educated both 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 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 were Brown and Alistair Darling. After the Labour Party lost power in the 2010 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.
Straw's prominence in the 1997-2010 Labour government has led him to be known as one of "The fantastic four of British Politics", along with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Prescott.
Early life
Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill in Essex, the son of 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. After his father 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. 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 second class degree in Law.
In 1966, he was in a group of 20 student leaders sent to Chile by the Fund for International Student Co-operation, a body led by Meta Ramsay and subsequently alleged to be a Central Intelligence Agency front. While the official purpose of the visit was to help build a youth centre on behalf of the British Council, the students were received by the CIA-backed Christian Democratic president Eduardo Frei Montalva and showed interest in the Socialist opposition leader Salvador Allende, with whom Straw managed to arrange a personal meeting. The British ambassador to Chile Alexander Stirling reported Straw to the Foreign Office for allegedly attempting to discredit the anticommunist leadership of the National Union of Students through a "minor scandal" in British-Chilean relations, and described him as 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 NUS Conference, he unsuccessfully ran for office in the union. 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. During his tenure he remained under MI5 surveillance as an alleged Communist sympathiser. 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.
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 following 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 following 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.Hillsborough and Macpherson Inquiries
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 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". 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".
Electoral reform and legislation
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 government, 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."