Ben Bradley (politician)
Benjamin David Bradley is an English Conservative Party politician. He has been the Member of Parliament for Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, since the 2017 general election. On 8 January 2018, during Theresa May's Cabinet reshuffle, Bradley was appointed as Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party for Youth. He resigned his role on 10 July 2018 in protest of May's strategy in relation to Brexit. He is also the chairman of Blue Collar Conservatives.
Early life
Bradley was born on 11 December 1989 in Ripley, Derbyshire, to Chris, a police officer, and Sally Bradley, a "public servant". He was privately educated at Derby Grammar School, a selective independent school in Littleover in Derbyshire. He briefly attended the University of Bath and the University of Salford, but did not complete his undergraduate studies at either. On returning to the East Midlands, he worked in a variety of jobs including as a landscape gardener, bartender and a supermarket shelf stacker. He subsequently attended Nottingham Trent University where he studied politics, graduating in 2013 with a first-class degree. After leaving university he worked for four months as a recruitment consultant, before becoming campaign manager and later constituency office manager for Mark Spencer, Conservative MP for Sherwood.Political career
Whilst working for Conservative MP Mark Spencer, Bradley was elected as Conservative councillor for the Hucknall North Ward on Ashfield District Council in May 2015, taking the newly created third seat for the ward following the approval of new ward boundaries. As well as working for Spencer, Bradley subsequently worked as a senior parliamentary assistant to Nick Boles, the then Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford.He was elected to Nottinghamshire County Council for the Hucknall North seat in May 2017.
Bradley was selected as the Conservative candidate for Mansfield for the June 2017 snap general election. He overturned a Labour majority of 5,315 to become the first ever Conservative MP for the seat. The constituency had been represented by the Labour Party's Alan Meale since 1987 - before Bradley was born. Aged 27, he was one of the youngest MPs elected in the 2017 general election, despite the acting Returning Officer wrongly announcing Meale as the victor.
Following his election as an MP, Bradley stepped down in September 2017 from his district council seat, and a by-election the following month saw the new Conservative Party candidate defeated by an Independent candidate for the vacant seat. He has been criticised by political rivals for not standing down as a county councillor following his election to Parliament on the grounds that he had missed key local votes while working in London. However, he has argued that his new role as an MP means he has better links to do his job as a councillor.
He won Parliamentary Beard of the Year in December 2017, after the seven time former winner, Jeremy Corbyn, was not allowed to stand.
Bradley sits on the Education Select Committee conducting Inquiries in to Special Educational Needs amongst other issues, and on the All-party Parliamentary groups for Ending Homelessness, Coalfields, Youth Services and Skills and Employment.
Brexit
Bradley supported the official position of his party and voted for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union in the EU membership referendum on 23 June 2016. Since the referendum, in which his constituency voted strongly to leave the EU, Bradley has continued to support his party and has voted for leaving the European Union.Bradley had a mixed voting record on Theresa May's proposed withdrawal deal. On 8 January 2018, during Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle, Bradley was appointed as the Vice-Chair for Youth at CCHQ. He later submitted his letter of resignation from this position on 10 July 2018 in protest at her strategy for delivering Brexit.
Controversy
In 2016, Bradley claimed online that Ashfield District Council had spent £17,000 on paying an Indian company to call local residents from a call centre in Mumbai. After a local newspaper contacted Bradley to ask him about the false claims, he responded: "I admit the post about using an Indian call centre was untrue and I took it down. I was just emphasising the point that the Council was wasting money."Whilst working for the Conservative MP Mark Spencer, both Bradley and Spencer were criticised in 2017 by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for misusing taxpayers' resources, such as the MP's newsletter, to link to "overtly party-political content". Bradley was sent on a training course on how to appropriately use parliamentary resources.
Shortly after his appointment as a Conservative Party Vice Chair in January 2018, Bradley attracted criticism for a 2012 blog post in which he wrote of a "vast sea of unemployed wasters" who he suggested should have vasectomies in order to stop them having multiple children. He subsequently apologised for the remarks, saying that his "time in politics has allowed me to mature and I now realise that this language is not appropriate". Later that year he apologised for having written "For once, I think police brutality should be encouraged!" in 2011, three days after Mark Duggan was killed by the police, an event which led to the 2011 riots in London and other English cities. Bradley was further criticised in 2018 for a 2011 blog post titled "Public sector workers: they don't know they're born!", in which he suggested that public sector workers should find alternative employment if they are unhappy with pay or working conditions.
In February 2018, Bradley falsely accused Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter of having "sold British secrets to communist spies" during the 1980s. Corbyn responded by instructing his solicitors to require Bradley to delete his tweet or face legal action on the grounds of libel. Bradley deleted the tweet following this legal complaint from Corbyn. He subsequently issued a full apology, agreed to make a substantial donation to a charity of Corbyn's choice and agreed to pay Corbyn's legal costs. A spokesman for Corbyn stated that the donation would be split between a homeless charity and a food bank, in Bradley's constituency of Mansfield. Two Conservative Party donors paid the £15,000 donation to the charities on behalf of Bradley. The apologetic post that Bradley made on Twitter became the most-shared tweet ever made by a Conservative MP.
That same year, Buzzfeed reported on emails sent by Bradley in 2016, wherein Bradley berated a local journalist, and threatened to cut off media access to the local branch of the Conservative party. This was in response to the journalist approaching Bradley for a comment on a series of Islamophobic posts made on a Conservative councillor’s Facebook page. Bradley’s response accused the journalist of ‘childish backstabbing’, as well as ‘colluding’ with the Labour Party, and described the Islamophobia story as ‘crap’.