Stephen Byers

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The Right Honourable Stephen John Byers (born April 13, 1953) is a British politician. He is the Labour Member of Parliament for Tyneside North and is a former cabinet minister.

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Early career

Stephen Byers was born in Wolverhampton. He attended the City of Chester Grammar School and the Chester College of Further Education, gained a law degree at Liverpool Polytechnic and became a law lecturer at the Newcastle Poytechnic from 1997 until his election to parliament. He was elected as a councillor to the North Tyneside District Council in 1980, and was its deputy leader from 1985 until he became an MP in 1992. He contested the safely Conservative seat of Hexham at the 1983 General Election where he finished in third place and some 14,000 votes behind the former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon. He was first elected to Parliament at the 1992 General Election for the safe Wallsend seat following the retirement of Ted Garrett, he secured a majority of 19,470. In 1993 he joined the influential Home Affairs Select Committee. He became an ally of Tony Blair, a fellow north-eastern Labour MP who was also a supporter of modernising the Labour Party. Blair had given him a job as soon as he became the Leader of the Opposition, and placed him in the Whips Office. He became a spokesman on Education and Employment in 1995, and he became something of an "outrider" for the New Labour project, regularly floating radical ideas on Blair's behalf to test reaction, such as when he briefed journalists in 1996 that the party might sever its links with the trade unions. Byers was swiftly appointed to Shadow ministerial posts and became the Minister for School Standards with the rank the title of Minister of State at the Department of Education and Employment following the victorious 1997 General Election. It is also worth noting that his Wallsend constituency had been abolished and he was elected for the equally safe Tyneside North and had a staggering 26,643 vote majority in 1997.

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Minister

He entered the Cabinet in July 1998 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and became a Member of the Privy Council. After the sudden resignation of Peter Mandelson, Byers was appointed as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in December 1998. After the 2001 General Election he was made Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government & the Regions, a move that was widely regarded as a demotion. His time in this job turned out to be highly controversial. Critics argued that Transport should be a job in its own right from the outset.

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Railtrack

The first source of controversy was the decision, taken at short notice and at a weekend, to ask the courts to put the privatised railway infrastructure company Railtrack into administration (October 6 2001), leading to the creation of Network Rail. This angered investors who had lost money, and under pressure from the City, the government eventually had to agree compensation terms.

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Political troubles

At almost the same time, it was revealed that Byers' political adviser Jo Moore had sent an email on September 11 2001 suggesting that the terrorist attacks made it "a very good day to get out anything we want to bury." Moore (and Byers) survived the resulting outrage, but in February 2002 the row broke out again. A leaked email from the Department of Transport's head of news Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC news reporter, seemed to warn Moore not to "bury" any more bad news on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral, implying that she was attempting to do so. On February 15 it was announced that both Moore and Sixsmith had resigned, but Sixsmith later said he had not agreed to go, and that Byers had insisted on Sixsmith's departure as the price for losing Moore. In May it was confirmed by the Department that Byers had announced Sixsmith's resignation prematurely, though the Government said that this was due to a misunderstanding, and he had done nothing wrong.

Byers' troubles continued over the following months. The Labour-dominated House of Commons Transport Select Committee criticised the party's transport strategy, and a long-running row over Byers' decision as Trade Secretary to allow pornographic-magazine publisher Richard Desmond to buy the Daily Express newspaper returned to the limelight. The pressure on Byers was too much, and he resigned on May 28, 2002. In the reshuffle that followed his resignation the post was split up with local government and the regions becoming a part of the remit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Transport portfolio retained by a full time Secretary of State for Transport.

On the backbenches Byers has kept up pressure for the Labour Party to modernise.

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Alleged misfeasance of public office

The legality of the decision to put Railtrack into administration was challenged by the individual shareholders who launched legal action alleging that Byers had committed the common law offence of 'misfeasance of public office'. Keith Rowley, QC, the barrister for the shareholders, alleged Byers had "devised a scheme by which he intended to injure the shareholders of Railtrack Group by impairing the value of their interests in that company without paying compensation and without the approval of Parliament". The case was heard in the High Court in July 2005; some embarrassment was caused to Byers when he admitted that an answer he had given to a House of Commons Select Committee was inaccurate.

However the Judge found on October 14 2005 that there was no evidence that Byers had committed the tort of misfeasance of public office. This would have required the shareholders to establish that Byers had been motivated by a deliberate desire to injure them, and the Judge found that his motive was to improve railway organisation. Byers asserted that he had been entirely vindicated by the judgment. He apologised in the House of Commons on October 17 for giving a "factually inaccurate" reply to the Select Committee but said that he had not intended to mislead them.

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External links

Template:Start box {{succession box 

 | title  = MP for Wallsend
 | years  = 1992–1997
 | before = Ted Garrett
 | after  = (constituency abolished)

}} {{incumbent succession box 

 | title  = MP for Tyneside North 
 | start  = 1997
 | before = (new constituency)

}} Template:Succession box |- style="text-align: center;" | width="30%" rowspan="2" | Preceded by:
The Lord Macdonald
of Tradeston
Min. State Transport | width="40%" style="text-align: center;" rowspan="2" | Secretary of State for Transport, Local
Government and the Regions
2001–2002 | width="30%" | Succeeded by:
John Prescott
Deputy Prime Minister |- style="text-align: center;" | width="30%" | Succeeded by:
Alistair Darling
Sec. State Transport Template:End boxsv:Stephen Byers

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