page_title: Barry Gardiner
section_title: Early opposition career: 2010–2016
hierarchical_section_title: Barry Gardiner / Parliamentary career / In opposition: 2010–present / Early opposition career: 2010–2016
caption_attribution_description: English: Barry Gardiner giving his speech at the 2016 Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.
context_page_description: Barry Strachan Gardiner is a British politician who has been Member of Parliament for Brent North since 1997. A member of the Labour Party, he served as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade and Shadow Minister for International Climate Change from 2016 until 2020.
  The son of an Olympic footballer, Gardiner was born and educated in Glasgow before being moved to boarding school in Hertfordshire. After studying at the University of St Andrews, Harvard University and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he became involved in local government and was the youngest person to be elected mayor of Cambridge.
  Gardiner was elected as MP for Brent North at the 1997 general election and served in Tony Blair's New Labour government from April 2004 to June 2007 as a junior minister in the Northern Ireland Office, Department of Trade and Industry and finally Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
  After holding junior positions on the Opposition frontbench under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, Gardiner served in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary from June to July 2016.
context_section_description: Gardiner was re-elected at the 2010 general election with a majority of 8,028 votes. Upon his re-election, he was described by Andrew Roth in The Guardian as "One of the best educated and most internationally experienced MPs". He nominated David Miliband in the 2010 Labour Party leadership election.
  Between 2011 and 2013, Gardiner served as Ed Miliband's Special Envoy for Environment and Climate Change. In June 2013, Gardiner and Conservative MP Tim Yeo jointly tabled an amendment to the Energy Bill which proposed establishing by 2014 a decarbonisation target for the UK's electricity generating sector, to be achieved by 2030. The amendment was narrowly defeated.
  Gardiner was appointed as Shadow Minister for Natural Environment and Fisheries in July 2013. In this role, Gardiner criticised the lack of prosecutions of leading players ten months after David Cameron promised that everything possible would be done to deal with crime relating to the horse meat scandal. "The extraordinary thing is that because of its clout, industry has been able to commit what appears to be a criminal offence – selling the public horsemeat falsely labelled as beef – and just say they are sorry and didn't know". He gave his support in 2014 to the first annual Hen Harrier Day demonstrations in Derbyshire to highlight the illegal persecution of UK raptors. In January 2015, he admitted the push by the previous Labour government to encourage car-buyers to opt for diesel vehicles in a bid to protect the environment was "wrong", identifying that a "massive problem for public health" had been created.
caption: Gardiner giving his speech at the 2016 Labour Party Conference
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