Joseph Ashton (politician)

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Joseph William Ashton (born October 9, 1933), usually known as Joe Ashton, is a British Labour Party politician who was known for his northern-accented defence of the rights of Labour members of Parliament against the demands of the left-wing of the party to subject them to mandatory reselection.

Police raids in November 1998 on two massage parlours in Kingsley Park Terrace, Northampton resulted in the discovery of Joe Ashton, then Labour MP for Bassetlaw, in the Siam Sauna with a 21-year-old Thai woman. http://www.northantset.co.uk/news/Brothel-madam-claims-exhusband-stole.3456409.jp

1 Early career
2 1970s
3 Conference speech
4 References

[edit] Early career

Ashton was born and brought up in Sheffield. He was first elected as a Member of Parliament for Bassetlaw in a 1968 by-election, when he did well to hold the constituency at a time when the Harold Wilson government was highly unpopular and the previous MP (Fred Bellenger) had held a substantial personal vote.

[edit] 1970s

In 1974, when corruption allegations about MPs were widely circulating, Ashton gave an interview to the Labour Party newspaper Labour Weekly. Seeking to defend MPs in general, Ashton insisted that the number who were guilty of corruption "could be counted on the fingers of one hand". This statement backfired, as newspapers demanded that he name the guilty five MPs.

In the late 1970s Ashton served as a junior minister in the government of James Callaghan. After the Labour Party went into opposition he wrote a column for the Daily Star and made regular TV appearances in connection with his football club, Sheffield Wednesday, of which he was a director.

[edit] Conference speech

Ashton saw himself as the 'shop steward' for the Parliamentary Labour Party. When left-wing Labour Party activists demanded that sitting MPs submit themselves to their local parties for approval in each Parliament, he made a strong speech at the Labour Party conference in which he said he was pleading to save the jobs of the MPs. He referred to the large number of Labour MPs who had died of stress-related illnesses and linked that to pressure brought on them by their local parties.

Two years before he stood down, he faced allegations about his presence at a 'Thai massage parlour' in Northampton during a police raid ^[1]. Following his retirement, he was succeeded by John Mann.