Barry Gardiner

Barry Strachan Gardiner (born 10 March 1957) has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent North since 1997. He served as a junior minister in the Northern Ireland Office, the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry, the Department of Trade and Industry and finally in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Election
Gardiner contested the London constituency of Brent North at the 1997 general election defeating the incumbent Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson by 4,019 votes. Following his election as MP for Brent North, Gardiner moved from Cambridge to Hertfordshire.

Committee work
He served on four select committee]]s, the Procedure Committee and the Select Committee on Broadcasting, the Public Accounts Committee and the Joint Committee on Consolidation of Bills.

He was Chair of the PLP Departmental Committee for Culture, Media and Sport and Vice-chair of the PLP Departmental Committee for the Treasury.

He was the Chairman of the Labour Friends of India, and has lectured at the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. He is a former Vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

Government and ministerial appointments
He became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State at the Home Office, Beverley Hughes in 2002. In 2004 he was appointed the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office, moving to the same position at the Department of Trade and Industry following the 2005 General Election. He moved to DEFRA at the May 2006 reshuffle and left the Government in June 2007.

Post-election 2010
In opposition he has served as a shadow minister and shadow cabinet minister in a number of positions. As shadow Environment minister, Gardiner criticised the lack of prosecutions of leading players ten months after David Cameron promised that everything possible would be done to deal with crime relating to the horse meat scandal. "The extraordinary thing is that because of its clout, industry has been able to commit what appears to be a criminal offence – selling the public horsemeat falsely labelled as beef – and just say they are sorry and didn't know".

Environmental concerns
Barry Gardiner was appointed as Shadow Minister for the Natural Environment and Fisheries in July 2013. He had previously held the role of Minister for Biodiversity in the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs in 2006 and 2007, and had served as Edward Miliband's Special Envoy for Environment and Climate Change between 2011 and 2013.

In June 2013, Conservative MP Tim Yeo and Barry Gardiner jointly tabled an amendment to the UK Energy Bill which proposed establishing by 2014 a decarbonisation target for the UK’s electricity generating sector, to be achieved by 2030. The amendment was narrowly defeated.<