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Jack Dromey

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John Eugene Joseph Dromey (29 September 1948 – 7 January 2022) was a British politician and trade unionist who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Birmingham Erdington from 2010 to 2022. A member of the Labour Party, he served as Deputy General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union and later Unite from 2003 to 2010.

Jack Dromey
Official portrait, 2019
Member of Parliament
for Birmingham Erdington
In office
6 May 2010 – 7 January 2022
Preceded bySiôn Simon
Succeeded byPaulette Hamilton
Treasurer of the Labour Party
In office
30 September 2004 – 26 September 2010
Leader
Preceded byJimmy Elsby
Succeeded byDiana Holland
Deputy General Secretary of Unite[a]
In office
2003–2010
General SecretaryTony Woodley
Derek Simpson
Preceded byTony Woodley
Succeeded byOffice abolished
Personal details
Born
John Eugene Joseph Dromey

(1948-09-29)29 September 1948
Brent, Middlesex, England
Died7 January 2022(2022-01-07) (aged 73)
Birmingham, England
Political partyLabour
Spouse
​
(m. 1982)​

Early life and career

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John Eugene Joseph Dromey was born on 29 September 1948 to Irish parents in Brent, Middlesex.[1][2] He was raised in Kilburn and educated at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, then a grammar school.[3][4]

In the early 1970s, while working at the Brent Law Centre, Dromey was elected as chairman of his branch of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) and as a delegate to the Brent Trades Council. In 1973 he took a leading role in planning the occupation of Centre Point,[5] along with prominent Housing and Direct Action campaigners Jim Radford and Ron Bailey. This high-profile event was designed to highlight and publicise the perceived injustice of London's most prominent (and tallest) building development – which included a number of luxury flats – remaining empty for consecutive years while tens of thousands of people languished on housing waiting lists across the capital. The event was postponed in 1973 but eventually carried out successfully in January the following year.[6]

Dromey built a reputation as an effective speaker and organiser in the trade union movement and through his involvement with Brent Trades Council and the Greater London Association of Trades Councils, who sent him as a delegate to the South East Regional Council of the Trades Union Congress.[7] Dromey attended the 1976 "Luanda Trial" a.k.a. "Mercenaries' Trial" in Luanda, Angola, as an "observer".[8]

As secretary of the local Trades Council he also had a prominent role in supporting the strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory which lasted from 1976 to 1978. The mostly-female Asian workforce at Grunwick went on strike to demand that company boss George Ward recognise their union; instead, Ward dismissed the strikers, leading to a two-year-long confrontation involving mass picketing and some violence. The strike was ultimately unsuccessful.[9]

Dromey was appointed deputy general secretary of the TGWU, having lost the 2003 election for general secretary to Tony Woodley by a wide margin.[10][11]

Parliamentary career

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Dromey (right) with Frank Sharry at Chatham House in 2011

Dromey first sought to stand for Labour at the 1997 general election but failed to make the shortlist for the Pontefract and Castleford constituency.[12]

Dromey again sought a safe seat in 2007, when there were plans for a general election to be called. Peter Watt, the then Labour general secretary, later revealed that Unite the Union had given £1 million in donations on the assumption of Dromey gaining nomination for the safe seat of Wolverhampton North East.[13]

In August 2009, it was revealed that senior Labour figures thought Dromey was likely to be selected in the Leyton and Wanstead constituency for the 2010 general election.[14] The chair of Leyton and Wanstead Constituency Labour Party said he would be "somewhat aggrieved" were Dromey selected[15] and Dromey's wife Harriet Harman had campaigned for all-women shortlists in safe seats.[13] The party's candidates for the constituency were due to be announced in November 2009, though this was delayed for at least two months, with The Daily Telegraph alleging that the announcement was going to be made at the last possible minute so Dromey could be imposed as the candidate using emergency rules.[16] It was revealed in January 2010 that the seat would not be subject to an all-woman shortlist,[17] but the Constituency Labour Party subsequently selected former Hornchurch MP John Cryer as its candidate on 27 February.[18]

In February 2010, Siôn Simon, Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington since 2001, announced his intention to stand down at the imminent general election. The NEC of the Labour Party swiftly announced that Birmingham Erdington would have an open shortlist. Dromey was confirmed to have made that shortlist. On 27 February 2010, it was confirmed that Dromey had been selected as the Labour Party candidate for Birmingham Erdington.[19] He was elected on 6 May 2010.[20]

Dromey joined the Labour frontbench, under leader Ed Miliband, as Shadow Minister for Housing from 2010 until 2013 when he became Shadow Minister for Policing. He remained in post following Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader until his resignation in June 2016, but returned to the frontbench as Shadow Minister for Labour in October 2016.[21] He was appointed Shadow Minister for Pensions in 2018, and continued to serve in the role under Keir Starmer until 2021, when he joined the shadow Cabinet Office team as Shadow Paymaster General. He was later appointed Shadow Immigration minister in the December reshuffle, serving in the role for a month before his sudden death in January 2022.

In November 2011, John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, launched an investigation into allegations that Dromey had failed to declare thousands of pounds in salary. Dromey's entry in the register of Members' interests stated he had declined his salary from Unite since entering Parliament. However, in October 2011 he changed his entry to state "Between the General Election and 30 October 2010, I received £27,867 in salary."[22] Dromey apologised to the House of Commons on 19 January 2012, in relation to this mistake.[23]

He supported Owen Smith in the failed attempt to replace Jeremy Corbyn in the 2016 Labour leadership election.[24]

 
Official portrait, 2017

Dromey retained his seat in the 2019 general election; although his majority fell to ten percentage points, he won more than 50 per cent of the vote.[25][26]

In January 2021, Dromey moved to the Shadow Cabinet Office team, led by Rachel Reeves, as Shadow Paymaster General.[27][28] In December 2021, during the reshuffle of the shadow ministerial team, he became Shadow Minister for Immigration. However, as he died a month later, he only made one parliamentary speech in this capacity in a Westminster Hall debate on the Afghan resettlement scheme just the day before his death.[29]

Controversies

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Dromey was a member of the executive committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL; now Liberty) in the 1970s during a period when the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had taken out corporate membership of NCCL. Dromey denied supporting PIE or its aims, stating that he actively opposed the links between the two groups and voted for the expulsion of the group at the NCCL Annual General Meeting.[30][31]

On 15 March 2006, during the Cash for Peerages scandal, Dromey said he was unaware – despite being the Labour Party treasurer – of £3.5 million loaned to the Labour Party in 2005 by three persons who were subsequently nominated for life peerages (Chai Patel, Sir David Garrard, and Barry Townsley). Loans made on commercial terms, as was claimed to be the case here, are not subject to reporting requirements to the Electoral Commission.[32]

Dromey stated publicly that neither he nor Labour's elected National Executive Committee (NEC) chairman, Sir Jeremy Beecham, had knowledge of or involvement in the loans, and that he had become aware of them when he read about them in the newspapers. Dromey stated that he was regularly consulted about conventional bank loans. As well as announcing his own investigation, he called on the Electoral Commission to investigate the issue of political parties taking out loans from non-commercial sources. His report was discussed by the NEC on 21 March 2006.[33][34]

Dromey was caught up in a further financial scandal in 2007, as he was responsible for party finances, which included more than £630,000 in illegal donations from David Abrahams. Dromey again claimed to know nothing of the donations, with critics wondering why he had not examined the issue more closely.[35][36] Harriet Harman, Dromey's wife, was also caught up in the affair, as her staff had solicited and accepted donations totalling £5,000.[37][38][39]

Personal life and death

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Dromey married Harriet Harman in 1982 in the Borough of Brent, after meeting her on the picket line of the Grunwick dispute in 1977; Harman was legal advisor to the Grunwick Strike Committee. They had three children: Harry (born February 1983), Joseph (born November 1984) and Amy (born January 1987), who has taken Harman's surname. Labour colleague Patricia Hewitt is godmother to one of their children.[40] Their son Joe was a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham between 2014 and 2021.[41] They had a house in Suffolk,[42] in addition to a home in Herne Hill, south London.[43]

The couple decided to send their children to selective schools, the subject of negative comments at the time.[44] Dromey served for ten years on the executive of the National Council for Civil Liberties,[45] a pressure group for which Harman worked as legal officer.[46] Dromey, whose parents were from counties Cork and Tipperary, was a strong supporter of Irish causes in Parliament and in his Birmingham constituency, and a regular attender at the city's yearly St Patrick's Day parades.[47]

Dromey died from heart failure at his flat in Birmingham on 7 January 2022, at the age of 73.[10][48] Former prime minister Tony Blair described Dromey as a "stalwart of the Labour and trade union movement", while Gordon Brown said he had lost "a friend, colleague and great humanitarian who never stopped fighting for social justice". The flags of Parliament were lowered to half-mast, and House of Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle said MPs were "all in disbelief that the life-force that was Jack Dromey has died".[49]

His funeral was held on 31 January 2022 at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.[50] Those in attendance included Hoyle, Blair, Brown, Ed Balls, Andrew Marr, and MPs Ed Miliband, Lisa Nandy and Jacob Rees-Mogg.[51] Speaking at the service, Brown said that Dromey "made and remade history".[52]

Notes

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  1. ^ Transport and General Workers' Union (2003–2007)

References

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  1. ^ "No. 61961". The London Gazette. 19 June 2017. p. 11778.
  2. ^ "Biography for Jack Dromey". Archived from the original on 22 September 2017. Retrieved 21 September 2017.
  3. ^ "Jack Dromey MP supports All Schools initiative". Archived from the original on 15 March 2014. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
  4. ^ "Dromey, Jack, (born 29 Sept. 1948), MP (Lab) Birmingham Erdington, since 2010". Who's Who & Who Was Who. 2010. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U251536. ISBN 978-0-19-954088-4. Archived from the original on 21 January 2018. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  5. ^ Jack Dromey (25 June 2014). "Private Rented Sector". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). UK Parliament. col. 351. Archived from the original on 30 January 2016. Retrieved 23 January 2016.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ^ Platt, Edward (17 January 1999). "Hot air over an office block". The Independent. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  7. ^ Penn, Helen (3 September 2018). 'Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible': A Memoir of Work in Childcare and Education. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-66152-2 – via Google Books.
  8. ^ "Haldane Society Notes". Bulletin (Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers) (9): 1–3. 1978. ISSN 2517-7281. JSTOR 44749726.
  9. ^ Manzoor, Sarfraz (20 January 2010). "How Asian women made trade union history and shattered stereotypes". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 9 September 2013. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
  10. ^ a b Murray, Jessica (7 January 2022). "Jack Dromey, Labour MP, dies aged 73". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 January 2022.
  11. ^ Rodgers, Sienna (7 January 2022). "Labour shadow minister Jack Dromey dies aged 73". LabourList. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  12. ^ "Election '97: Dromey off safe seat shortlist". The Independent. London. 3 April 1997. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  13. ^ a b "Union gift sparks 'cash for seats' row". The Sunday Times. 27 September 2009. Archived from the original on 29 May 2015.
  14. ^ Hennessy, Patrick (15 August 2009). "Harriet Harman's husband, Jack Dromey, lined up for safe Labour seat". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 12 May 2010. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  15. ^ "Activists concerned about possible selection of Harriet Harman's husband". East London and West Essex Guardian. 12 November 2009. Archived from the original on 15 November 2009. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  16. ^ Gilligan, Andrew (12 November 2009). "'Plot' to give Harriet Harman's husband a safe seat". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 16 November 2009. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  17. ^ Eden, Richard (23 January 2010). "Harriet Harman's husband Jack Dromey may benefit from feminist retreat". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 27 January 2010. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  18. ^ "Labour candidate speaks on selection". East London and West Essex Guardian. 28 February 2010. Archived from the original on 2 March 2010. Retrieved 29 April 2012.
  19. ^ "Harriet Harman's husband Jack Dromey to stand in next election". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 6 June 2010. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
  20. ^ "General Election 2010". Birmingham City Council. Archived from the original on 24 November 2011.
  21. ^ Walker, Jonathan (10 October 2016). "MP explains why he's back on Jeremy Corbyn's team after calling for his resignation". Birmingham Mail. Archived from the original on 11 October 2016. Retrieved 11 October 2016.
  22. ^ "Politics". Archived from the original on 12 November 2011. Retrieved 11 November 2011.
  23. ^ "MP Dromey apologises for breaching Commons rules". BBC News. 19 January 2012. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  24. ^ "Full list of MPs and MEPs backing challenger Owen Smith". LabourList. 21 July 2016. Archived from the original on 15 July 2019. Retrieved 15 July 2019.
  25. ^ "General Election 2019: results and analysis" (PDF) (Second ed.). House of Commons Library. 28 January 2020. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  26. ^ "Birmingham Erdington parliamentary constituency – Election 2019". BBC News. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  27. ^ Rodgers, Sienna (7 January 2021). "New roles for Dromey, Anderson, Rodda and Tarry in Labour reshuffle". LabourList. Retrieved 8 January 2021.
  28. ^ Rodgers, Sienna (14 May 2021). "Reshuffle: Keir Starmer's new Labour frontbench in full". LabourList. Retrieved 15 May 2021.
  29. ^ "Spoken contributions of Jack Dromey". MPs and Lords. UK Parliament. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  30. ^ "MP Jack Dromey denies paedophile group 'smear'". BBC News. 26 February 2014. Archived from the original on 4 March 2014. Retrieved 2 March 2014.
  31. ^ "How paedophiles infiltrated the left and hijacked the fight for civil rights". The Guardian. 2 March 2014. Archived from the original on 8 December 2019. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
  32. ^ Millar, Frank (16 March 2006). "'Cash-for-peerages' row escalates". The Irish Times. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  33. ^ Assinder, Nick (22 March 2006). "Labour moves to close funding row". BBC News. Archived from the original on 19 December 2006. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  34. ^ Booth, Robert; Hélène Mulholland; and agencies (16 March 2006). "Labour to publicise future loans". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  35. ^ Elliott, Francis (29 November 2007). "Angry Jack Dromey declares he is victim of concealment". The Times. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  36. ^ "Donations were 'wrong' – Dromey". BBC News. 28 November 2007. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  37. ^ "Harman did solicit donation". Channel 4 News. 29 November 2007. Archived from the original on 7 October 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  38. ^ "Dromey facing treasurer challenge". BBC News. 5 February 2008. Archived from the original on 9 February 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  39. ^ "Harriet Harman's Husband Jack Dromey Challenged For Labour Treasurer". Sky News. Archived from the original on 12 July 2011. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  40. ^ "Profile: Harriet Harman". The Times. 22 February 2009.[dead link‍][dead link‍]
  41. ^ "Lewisham Councillor Joe Dromey appointed Director of Central London Forward". Lewisham Council. Retrieved 7 January 2022.
  42. ^ Sapsted, David (21 September 2007). "Harriet Harman avoids court over speeding". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 4 December 2007. Retrieved 2 December 2007.
  43. ^ "Father's rooftop protest goes on". BBC News. 9 June 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2010.
  44. ^ Macintyre, Donald (20 January 1996). "Why my son will go to grammar school, by Harriet Harman". The Independent. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  45. ^ "Dromey biodata". Archived from the original on 21 July 2007. Retrieved 28 September 2013.
  46. ^ Beckford, Martin (9 March 2009). "Harriet Harman under attack over bid to water down child pornography law". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 22 February 2011. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  47. ^ Audley, Fiona (7 January 2022). "Shock in parliament as Irish MP for Birmingham Jack Dromey dies suddenly, aged 73". The Irish Post. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  48. ^ Wheeler, Richard (3 February 2022). "Harriet Harman pays tribute to her late husband for his 'superpower' of support". The Independent. Retrieved 3 February 2022.
  49. ^ "Labour MP Jack Dromey dies aged 73". BBC News. 7 January 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  50. ^ "Jack Dromey: Funeral held for veteran Erdington MP". BBC News. 31 January 2022. Retrieved 31 January 2022.
  51. ^ "Labour MP Jack Dromey's funeral held in London". Metro. 31 January 2022. Retrieved 31 January 2022.
  52. ^ "'He made and remade history': funeral held for Labour MP Jack Dromey". The Guardian. 31 January 2022. Retrieved 31 January 2022.
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Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Member of Parliament for Birmingham Erdington
2010–2022 		Succeeded by
Trade union offices
Preceded by Deputy General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union
2003–2007 		Position abolished
New title
Position established
 Deputy General Secretary of Unite
2007–2010
Served alongside: Graham Goddard (2007–2009) 		?
Party political offices
Preceded by Treasurer of the Labour Party
2004–2010 		Succeeded by
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