Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit, PC (born March 29, 1931), is a right-wing British Conservative politician and formerly MP for Chingford, Essex.
Born in Enfield, he was a journalist on the Financial Times, before serving with the RAF during four years of National Service. On leaving the RAF he joined BOAC in 1953 as a pilot. He entered politics in 1970.
He was a close ally of Margaret Thatcher and served as her Secretary of State for Employment, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade (October 1983 - September 1985), as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and as party chairman (1985 - 1987). During the Brighton hotel bombing he was injured and his wife, Margaret, was permanently disabled.
In the aftermath of urban riots (Handsworth riots and Brixton riot) in the summer of 1981, Tebbit responded to a suggestion that the rioting was caused by unemployment by saying:
- I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it.
This exchange was the origin of the attribution to Tebbit of the slogan On yer bike!.
He is also famous for his "cricket test", also known as the "Tebbit test", where he suggested that people from ethnic minorities in Britain should not be considered truly British until they supported the England cricket team, as opposed to the country of their or their ancestors' birth.
The American bombing of Tripoli in 1986 proved highly controversial with the Norman Tebbit as party chairman.
Tebbit decided not to stand in the 1992 election. After the election he was granted a peerage and entered the House of Lords. He is a vice-president of the Conservative Way Forward group. His former seat of Chingford was aggregated with Woodford Green in boundary changes and was held for the Conservative Party by his successor, and protégé Iain Duncan Smith.
He is an extreme Eurosceptic and his outspoken views on race and immigration have brought him both support and opprobrium (he was nicknamed the "Chingford skinhead").
In 2004, he continued to provoke strong reactions with his outspoken opposition to the UK Government's Gender Recognition Bill - designed to allow transsexual people to gain legal recognition of their acquired gender - and its Civil Partnership Bill, designed to offer same-sex couples the opportunity to gain legal recognition of their relationship with an associated set of rights and responsibilities.
Last updated: 08-16-2005 16:49:40
