James Elles

James Elles (born 3 September 1949) has been a Member of the European Parliament since 1984. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a BSc (hons) in Agriculture. He became a Euro MP after an eight-year career as a civil servant with the European Commission, initially as a Tokyo Round negotiator and latter as Assistant to the Deputy Director General of Agriculture.

James is one of four Conservative Euro MPs for the South-East region, where there are no less than 83 Westminster constituencies. In order to make themselves as democratically accountable as possible to the electorate, the four Conservative Members have divided up the region into specific geographical areas. James Elles has special Conservative responsibility for the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The three counties have a combined population of over two million, they cover over 2,100 square miles and take in 21 Westminster constituencies.

James is the British Conservatives’ spokesman on budgetary control. He is the longest serving member of the European Parliament’s budgets committee, having been a member for the past 23 years. James is also a full member of the budgetary control committee and a substitute member of the foreign affairs committee. He is also a member of the Euro-Med delegation.

He was rapporteur (the person appointed to steer a measure through Parliament) for the 1996 Budget which was regarded as the best “value for money” budget seen in the European Parliament. Recognised for his key role in the downfall of the Santer Commission in 1999, his action in this affair was summed up by the European Parliament’s newsletter: “James Elles has become the unsung hero of Parliament’s challenge to the Commission, the man who was in at the birth and the kill of the two-year campaign to establish Parliament’s authority over the way public money is spent.”

Now in his fifth term as a European MP, James Elles is an active spokesman for his constituents and human rights. In 1985 his concern over the drastic skills shortages afflicting the Thames Valley prompted him to create, with his mother Baroness Elles (then a European MP), an organisation called Target. Operating over a period of 15 years, Target brought together the business and training worlds who collectively addressed the issue of preparing women to get back into the workplace.

He was also the first European MP to set up an organisation to assist businessmen and women in his constituency to prepare for the Single Market in 1992. Today the European Network for Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire (ENBBO) is a highly successful network of business people, local government representatives, educationalists and local key players. Its aim is to help key people in the constituency understand and keep abreast of what is going on in the European Union while functioning as a platform for information sharing and problem solving.

In 1992 he founded the [http://www.tpnonline.org Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN)] a non-profit organisation which brought together European and American parliamentarians, businessmen and academics to discuss ways to strengthen the transatlantic partnership. The purpose of TPN is to help build bridges between the US and EU involving business and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic, feeding in ideas, for example, to create the new transatlantic agenda (NTA) and, more, recently putting forward suggestions to strengthen transatlantic partnership through the completion of the transatlantic market.

James is also the Chairman of the Kashmir All Party Group in the Parliament and a strong and vocal supporter for human rights in Kashmir.

In August 2002, James launched the [http://www.ein.eu European Ideas Network (EIN)] . It is an innovative and exciting new kind of body: an open network think-tank on a European scale. This is a tangible example of James’s commitment to greater involvement in policy making by Party members and the wider public.

A linguist, speaking French, Italian and some German, James is chairman of the European Parliament’s Golfing Society.

External links

* [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/public/geoSearch/view.do?country=GB&partNumber=1&zone=South+East&language=EN&id=1419 Profile at European Parliament website]