Rt Hon Jack Straw MP – “Wake-up Call or Call to Prayer? War and Peace in the Middle East”

The Rt Hon Jack Straw is Member of Parliament for Blackburn, having served in senior Cabinet positions in successive Labour governments from 1997 to 2010.
Jack Straw is one of the most experienced British and European politicians. After a prominent radical role in national student politics in the 1960s he worked as a barrister, spent three years as adviser to two Cabinet Ministers (Barbara Castle and Peter Shore), and then worked on Granada TV’s flagship World in Action programme. He was a London borough councillor and deputy leader of the Inner London Education Authority.
He first entered Parliament as a Labour MP representing Blackburn in 1979 and had a number of Shadow Cabinet roles. After the Labour Party’s 1997 election victory he served as Home Secretary before becoming Foreign Secretary in 2001 where he played a leading role in the dramatic foreign policy problems arising from the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and then the interventions in Afghanistan and then Iraq. He publicly defended these decisions, but in 2010 he told the Iraq Inquiry in London that the 2003 decision to go to war “had haunted him”.
In 2006 he was appointed Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal with responsibility for parliamentary reform. He finally served as Lord High Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice from 2007 until 2010.
Now again in Opposition, Jack Straw is an influential voice in British politics on a wide range of economic and foreign policy issues. He has been outspoken on strategic European questions including prospects for the Eurozone, car insurance sector reform and ‘multi-culturalism’ (his Blackburn constituency has a sizeable Muslim community). He was also closely involved in key decisions concerning the intervention in Iraq and the renegotiation of the EU Budget.