Jean-Paul Floru

Jean-Paul Floru (born 1969 in Aalst, Belgium) is a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom. He is currently a councillor in the City of Westminster and a candidate for the Conservative Party for the European Parliament (2009 elections).

Biography

Floru studied at the Catholic University of Brussels and Leuven University (spending one year at the University of Leeds), and obtained a Master of Law degree in 1995. From 1995 to 1997 he attended the College of Law in London, before qualifying as a solicitor at Lovells in the City of London. Since 2000, Floru has been running two small businesses.

He was elected to the City of Westminster Council in 2006, for the Hyde Park ward. In the Hyde Park ward, the Conservative Party obtained more than 69% of the vote. He focuses on planning and on keeping the council tax one of the lowest in the country.

In 2005 he founded Freedom Alliance, an organisation promoting libertarianism and free market capitalism through Freedom Week, an annual week-long seminar for students at Cambridge University.

In 2008 he was selected as one of the eight candidates for the Conservative Party for the European Parliament for the London region. Campaigning under the slogan "Do you want your country back?" with a free market-oriented and eurosceptic programme, he topped the poll in a postal ballot of all London's Conservative Party members. In accordance with party rules, he will occupy the fourth place on the list for the 2009 European elections.

Floru is a committed free marketeer and the author of numerous articles on economics. His stated political heroes are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and is a follower of the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. He is close to the Taxpayers' Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute.

Articles

* [http://tpa.typepad.com/research/2008/02/cllr-j-p-floru.html] Put fat government on a diet to make the cake grow (Taxpayers' Alliance 2008)
* [http://tpa.typepad.com/research/2008/03/cllr-j-p-floru.html] Celtic Tiger through tax cuts, not EU subsidies (Taxpayers' Alliance 2008)
* [http://www.global-vision.net/files/downloads/download388.pdf] Adam Smith and the European Union: Is the EU compatible with free market principles? (Global Vision 2008)
* [http://www.europeanfoundation.org/docs/ej1109.pdf] The Belgian disease (The European Journal 2004)

External links

* [http://www.jpfloru.com] , JP Floru's personal webpage and weblog
* [http://my.telegraph.co.uk/JP_Floru] , JP Floru's Daily Telegraph Blog
* [http://www.freedomweek.org.uk] , Freedom Alliance website