Peter Hain
Peter Gerald Hain, Baron Hain, 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 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 Secretary from 2005 to 2007.
Hain ran for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in the 2007 deputy leadership election, coming fifth out of six candidates. He was promoted to Work and Pensions Secretary by new leader Gordon Brown, while remaining Welsh Secretary. His failure to declare donations during the deputy leadership contest led to his resignation from both roles in 2008. He later returned to the Cabinet from 2009 to 2010 as Welsh Secretary.
After Labour was defeated at the 2010 general election, Hain was Shadow Welsh Secretary in the Miliband shadow cabinet from 2010 until 2012, when he announced his retirement from frontline politics. In June 2014 he announced that he would stand down as MP for Neath at the 2015 general election and was subsequently nominated for a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours.
Early life
Whilst his father was working temporarily there, Hain was born in Nairobi in what was then Kenya Colony, but he moved to the Union of South Africa when his parents returned about a year later. His South African parents, Walter Vannet Hain and Adelaine Hain, were anti-apartheid activists in the Liberal Party of South Africa, for which they were made "banned persons", briefly imprisoned, and prevented from working.When Hain was 10, he was awoken in the early hours by police officers searching his bedroom for 'incriminating documents'. Aged 11 he was again awoken to be told his parents had been imprisoned for leafleting in support of Nelson Mandela's campaign; they were released without charge after 14 days' detention. At 15, Hain spoke at the funeral of John Frederick Harris, an anti-apartheid activist who was hanged for murder for the bombing of the Johannesburg main railway station, injuring 23 people and killing one. Hain and his parents strongly opposed the bombing but stood by Harris and his wife Ann and baby son David, who were family friends. As a result of security police harassment, Hain's father was unable to continue his work as an architect, and the family, deprived of an income, was forced to leave for the United Kingdom in 1966.
Life in South Africa and London
Hain was educated in South Africa at Hatfield Primary School and Pretoria Boys High School and in London at Emanuel School, a private school, Queen Mary College, University of London, graduating with a first class bachelor's degree in Economics and Political science in 1973, and at the University of Sussex, obtaining an MPhil. After university, Hain worked as a researcher for the Union of Communication Workers from September 1976, later rising to become their head of research. During this time, Hain wrote several articles that harshly criticised Israel, including a 1976 piece in The Guardian newspaper where he stated that Israel needed to be dismantled to make way for a secular, democratic Palestinian state.Anti-apartheid activism
Having joined the British Anti-Apartheid Movement aged 17 in 1967. When Hain was 19, he became chairman of the Stop The '70 Tour campaign which disrupted tours by the South African rugby union and cricket teams in 1969 and 1970. In 1971, director John Goldschmidt produced a film for Granada's World in Action programme featuring Hain debating "Apartheid in South Africa" at the Oxford Union. The film was transmitted on the ITV network. In 1972 a private prosecution resulted in his conviction for criminal conspiracy at the Old Bailey for which he was fined £200. The prosecution was funded largely from apartheid-supporting whites in South Africa due to his campaign against white-only South African sports tours. He was acquitted of three other conspiracy counts after defending himself in the four-week trial described in the book edited by Derek Humphry, Cricket Conspiracy.In 1972, the South African Security Services were suspected of sending him a letter bomb that failed to explode because of faulty wiring. In 1976 Hain was tried for, and acquitted of, a 1975 bank theft, having been framed by the South African Bureau of State Security according to his 1987 book, A Putney Plot.
Joining the Liberal and Labour Parties
In 1968, he joined the Liberal Party and was elected chairperson in 1971 and then in 1975 president of the Young Liberals, but in 1977 switched to Labour. The same year, he was a founder of the Anti-Nazi League.Homosexual equality
In the 1970s, Hain was also honorary vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality when he clashed with lobbying interests from the Paedophile Information Exchange.Member of Parliament
He contested Putney in the 1983 and 1987 general elections but was defeated on both occasions by Conservative David Mellor.Having already been selected as Labour's candidate for the Neath constituency at the 1992 general election, Hain was elected to the House of Commons at the by-election in April 1991 that followed the death of the sitting member, Donald Coleman, who had announced his intention to retire at the next election. In 1995 he became a Labour whip and in 1996 became a shadow employment minister.
In government
Following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election he joined the government, first at the Welsh Office 1997–1999, then as minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1999 to 2001 with responsibility for Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.In November 1999, as Africa minister he met Robert Mugabe in London; Mugabe told him "I know you are not one of them, Peter; you are one of us," But the following day, following an attempt by Gay Rights campaigner Peter Tatchell to carry out a citizen's arrest on Mugabe, Mugabe accused Hain of being Tatchell's "wife".
In October 2000 he set up a war avoidance team to carry messages back and forth between himself and the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs in Iraq, Tariq Aziz. Team members who travelled repeatedly to Iraq on Hain's behalf included William Morris, Burhan Chalabi, and Nasser al-Khalifa. He voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, later calling it a "fringe issue" compared to other government priorities. However he subsequently described the Iraq invasion as a 'disaster' and said 'I believed the evidence shown me on weapons of mass destruction later discovered to be entirely false.'
In 2001, Hain moved briefly to the Department of Trade and Industry before returning to the Foreign Office as Minister for Europe, being sworn into the Privy Council the same year. He was vocal in advocating joint sovereignty of Gibraltar with Spain.
In October 2002, he joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, but continued to represent the UK at the Convention on the Future of Europe. In June 2003 he was made Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal in a cabinet reshuffle, but retained the Wales portfolio. In November 2004 he caused controversy among his political rivals when he claimed that "If we are tough on crime and on terrorism, as Labour is, then I think Britain will be safer under Labour".
On 6 May 2005, following the 2005 general election, Hain was appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland by Prime Minister Tony Blair, also retaining his Welsh position. He was responsible for negotiating the settlement which brought former enemies Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party into a power-sharing Northern Irish government from May 2007. Although previously a supporter of Irish unity, he has since retreated from this position.
On 28 June 2007, he was appointed as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in addition to retaining responsibility for Wales. He was a proponent of the "tough love" measures designed to force claimants, including the sick and disabled, back to work. He saw it as an anti-poverty, full-employment agenda. He resigned from his post when the issue of donations made to his campaign funds were referred to the police.
He set a level of compensation for the taxpayer funded Financial Assistance Scheme similar to that of the Industry funded Pension Protection Fund for those whose schemes had collapses before the establishment of the PPF. Referring to the long running Pensions Action Group campaign and speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Moneybox program on the day compensation was announced, pensions expert Ros Altmann, credited Hain and Mike O'Brien with "having been very different to deal with than their predecessors and..willing and eager to engage and find a way to sort this out."