Steve Baker (politician)

Steve Baker MP
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union
In office 13 June 2017 – 9 July 2018
Prime Minister	Theresa May
Preceded by	The Lord Bridges of Headley
Succeeded by	Chris Heaton-Harris
Member of Parliament for Wycombe
Incumbent
Assumed office 6 May 2010
Preceded by	Paul Goodman
Majority	6,578 (12.3%)
Personal details
Born	Steven John Baker (1971-06-06) 6 June 1971 St Austell, Cornwall, England
Political party	Conservative
Alma mater	University of Southampton St Cross College, Oxford
Website	Official website Commons website
Military career
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	Royal Air Force
Years of service	1989–1999
Rank	Flight lieutenant
Service number	5206370Q

Steven John Baker (born 6 June 1971) is a British Conservative Party politician and former Royal Air Force engineer, consultant and bank worker.^[1] He is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wycombe, having been first elected in the 2010 general election.^[2]

In June 2015, he became co-chairman of Conservatives for Britain, a campaigning organisation formed of eurosceptic MPs.^[3] He co-founded The Cobden Centre, on which he sits on the advisory board. He established and chairs the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Economics, Money and Banking. He was promoted to be Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union on 13 June 2017, but resigned from his office on 9 July 2018 following the resignation of David Davis over concerns with the Government strategy on Brexit.^[4][5]

Early life and career

Baker was born on the 6 June 1971 in St Austell in Cornwall.^[6] Baker was educated at Poltair School in St Austell and St Austell Sixth Form College followed by the University of Southampton^[7] where he gained a BEng in Aerospace Engineering. He later studied at St Cross College, Oxford, where he earned an MSc in Computation.

On 3 September 1989 Baker was commissioned as an Acting Pilot Officer into the Engineering Branch of the Royal Air Force, having previously held the rank of Corporal, before being regraded as a Pilot Officer on 15 July 1992.^[8][9] Baker retired from the RAF on 1 August 1999 at his own request having attained the rank of Flight lieutenant.^[10] He later worked as a consulting software engineer and manager. He was head of consulting and product manager with DecisionSoft Ltd (now named CoreFiling) in Oxford, 2000–01.

He was appointed as Chief Technical Officer at BASDA Ltd, Great Missenden in 2002, a position he held until 2007.^[11] For a year from 2005 he was director of product development at CoreFiling Ltd, Oxford. He was the chief architect of global financing and asset service platforms at Lehman Brothers, 2006–08. He has been principal of Ambriel Consulting Ltd since 2001. He is a founding member of The Cobden Centre, an educational charity promoting Austrian economics.^[12]

Parliamentary career

Baker was selected as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe on 31 October 2009, after former Conservative MP Paul Goodman stood down; it was the first seat for which Baker had sought selection.^[7] Baker held the seat for the Conservative Party. He received 23,423 votes – a vote share of 48.6%,^[13][14] higher than Goodman's 42.4% and 45.8% in the 2001 and 2005 general elections respectively.^[15] He was re-elected at the 2015 general election and 2017 general election.

Baker is rated as one of the Conservatives' top 10 most rebellious MPs of the 2010 intake.^[16] He was nominated as a 'Newcomer of the Year' on ConservativeHome.^[17] He was named as the most authoritative Member of Parliament on Twitter in January 2011.^[18][19]

In March 2011, Baker initiated an adjournment debate on the malicious prosecution of an operator of an independent mental health unit. Eventually, the Solicitor General Edward Garnier issued an apology.^[20]

Baker has campaigned for banking reform, calling for banks to re-adopt Generally Accepted Accounting Practice to account for devalued loans, as well as failed ones;^[21] in May 2011, he calculated that the use of IFRS instead of GAAP over-stated the strength of Royal Bank of Scotland's balance sheet by £25bn.^[22]

He introduced a Ten Minute Rule bill to 'bring casino banking into the light', by changing rules by which banks account for derivatives.^[23]

He was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee on 16 May 2012, saying he was 'fed up with factionalism' and wanted 'to stand as neither a modernising 301 candidate or a traditionalist'.^[24]

Baker was shortlisted for the Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award in 2015 for the founding of the Cobden Centre, and remains in the directory of the Grassroot Diplomat Who's Who publication.^[25]

On 8 July 2018 Baker resigned following the resignation of the Brexit Secretary, David Davis after working on a Brexit white paper which Baker said "did not accord with what was put to the cabinet" a few days earlier.^[5]

In the House of Commons he has sat on the Transport Committee and the Treasury Committee.^[26]

Political positions

Baker is regarded as being on the right wing of the Conservative Party, and is a member of the socially conservative Cornerstone Group. He describes his political inspiration as being the Liberal Richard Cobden, founding the Cobden Centre under the motto: 'Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less'.^[27][28] He has spoken about the free trade opportunities for the U.K. post-Brexit, but has warned of the need to protect against the trade policies of other countries, including China.^[29]

Baker rejects war as a policy, stating, "While clearly it has been breached repeatedly, the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1929 renounced war for the settlement of international disputes. It remains in force."^[30] Coupled with this, Baker is in favour of nuclear deterrents, on the grounds of "Van Creveld's argument that nuclear weapons make total war impossible".^[30]

He has expressed scepticism about the exact scope of human influence on climate change, specifically saying that the science appears to be subject to uncertainties and that bad economics are a greater threat to civilisation than climate change.^[31] He has generally voted against measures attempting to target climate change since becoming an MP.^[32] Despite being MP for a constituency through which High Speed 2 is not planned to run, Baker opposes the construction of the line against the party Whip.^[33] He argues that the plan does not 'make sense for the whole country', and, while believing that the route should not run through Buckinghamshire, campaigns to scrap the plans altogether, rather than re-routing them outside the county.^[34]

Baker opposes quantitative easing, saying it creates a worse crisis as an inevitable consequence.^[35]

Regarding parliamentary procedures, Baker wants to reform Early day motions (EDMs), possibly replacing them with "Members' Motions" on the grounds that EDMs 'are used to publicise the views of individual MPs', whereas a system such as 'Members' Motions' could be 'debated by the House'.^[36]

He voted in opposition to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, and called for the denationalisation of marriage. He argued that the current situation risks infringing both the freedoms of the religious and LGBT communities, and that private individuals should define the term marriage, rather than the state.^[37]

Baker was in favour of Brexit prior to the 2016 referendum.^[38] He stated at a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance taking place in 2010 that he "think[s] the European Union needs to be wholly torn down", considering it "an obstacle to" "free trade and peace among all the nations of Europe as well as the world".^[39]

Controversies

In 2011, Baker attracted controversy after he was one of three Conservative MPs who went on a luxury trip to Equatorial Guinea, funded by the Government of the state, via a trust based in Malta. They reported at the end of the trip that human rights violations in the country were “trivial”, in direct contrast to Amnesty International, who had reported repeated incidents of torture in the country.^{[40] [41]}

His lobbying for the deregulation of white asbestos has attracted controversy. In 2017, the union Unite raised concerns that Baker has lobbied for the deregulation of the life-threatening substance, including asking a number of parliamentary questions in 2010 and, in 2015, lobbying a government minister on the issue.^[42]

In February 2018, as a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union he was forced to apologise after inaccurately claiming that civil servants had deliberately produced negative economic models to influence policy. Answering questions in the House of Commons, Baker confirmed a claim by the Eurosceptic backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg that Charles Grant, the Director of the Centre for European Reform, had reported that Treasury officials “had deliberately developed a model to show that all options other than staying in the customs union were bad, and that officials intended to use this to influence policy”. Audio then emerged of the event in question, which showed the Grant had not made the comments attributed to him. By the time the audio was released by Prospect Magazine, the Prime Minister's spokesman had already backed Baker's claims.^[43]

References

External links

• Steven Baker MP Conservative Party profile
• Wycombe Conservatives
• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Contributions in Parliament at Hansard 2010–present
• Voting record at Public Whip
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou
• Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record