Simon Hughes

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This article is written in the 'future' (2023) and thus does not reflect the state of affairs in the present day, 1954. It does however represent a premonition of what is to come.

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## Simon Hughes

### Rank(s)

Deputy Minister-President of the Union of Britain 2011-2014

## Politics

### Ranks held

Deputy Minister-President 2011-2014Leader of the United Democrats 2009-2014 Home Minister 2000-2005 Justice Minister 2005-2007

**Simon Henry Ward Hughes** is a British former politician, lawyer and civil rights activist who served as Deputy Minister-President of the Union of Britain from 2011 to 2014. From 2009 to 2014 he was leader of the United Democrats, leading the party out of its landslide defeat at the 2009 general election into coalition government with the New Union Party from 2011. One of the UD's founding members, he sat as Member of the Common Assembly for Bermondsey and Old Southwark from 2000 to 2017.

Born in 1951, Hughes studied law at Cambridge National University, and was called to the bar in 1974. In 1977 he moved to London, and worked as a barrister. At university he had been a member of the underground Cambridge Liberal Club, and now in his legal career Hughes sought out and defended political opponents of Margaret Thatcher's Maximist regime when they were trialled for charges manufactured by the state to engineer a prison sentence. The nature of the British legal system, in which lawyers were assigned by the state to cases, meant Hughes routinely and illegally interfered with the assignment process to acquire political dissidents as clients. It also necessitated that he was extremely careful in how many dissidents he took on each year to avoid attracting attention - Hughes later said that he "helped far, far fewer people than I would have liked".

This extremely risky endeavour could never last however, and by 1989 Hughes had attracted the attention and suspicion of his superiors. In September that year, whilst arguing the defence of two Spanish fishermen accused of spying on behalf of Iberia, Hughes was himself arrested by the ISA and charged with treason. He was subsequently imprisoned in Belmarsh, the notorious ISA political prison, whilst awaiting trial, a period that Hughes has never spoken publicly about. The wait for trial ultimately proved far longer than expected owing to the chaos caused by the downfall of Thatcher's government in the wake of the 1990 Sellafield disaster - it was not until 1993, nearly four years after his imprisonment, that Hughes v. Ministry of Justice began.

Hughes stood accused of perverting the course of justice, subversion and treason under the 1953 Counterrevolutionary Activities Act. His case received a high degree of media attention, in large part due to the work of a young journalist Charles Kennedy in covering the story, and the decision by Minister of Truth Alastair Campbell not to bury coverage of the trial in the knowledge that it weakened the image of Arthur Scargill's government. Hughes, having worked as a defence lawyer for 15 years, represented himself in court, and he thus worked closely with Kennedy as the other man reported the story. Hughes' profile became so famous as the trial went on as to be picked up by media in the East, who took to referring to him as "the English Kerensky" after the lawyer who founded the Russian Republic. Even as public support for Hughes soared, however, the case increasingly looked as though it would end in his conviction and possibly even execution.

Hughes was saved by the intervention of Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Justice, who issued a pardon on the orders of the President of the Executive Committee Tony Blair. Blair, himself a former lawyer and keenly attuned to public opinion, came to the conclusion that pardoning Hughes would help to bolster his own image as a reformer and further weaken the already shaky authority of Chairman Scargill. Thus, on October 23rd 1993 Hughes was released from Belmarsh, having been disbarred from practicing law but having gained a massive national profile. In 1994, Scargill was ousted in a motion of no confidence by Blair, the latter's undermining of him by pardoning Hughes having arguably proven the final blow to the Chairman's government.

Taking advantage of his high national profile, Hughes became a civil rights activist and spokesperson for liberalisation amidst the rapidly changing Britain of Blair's Third Way reforms. In 1995, working again with the reporter Charles Kennedy he cofounded the Campaign for Civil Reform; a platform that grew rapidly in support amongst opponents of the syndicalist regime as Blair's grand vision rattled along at increasing speed. By the following year, Kenny Ashdown had emerged as the figurehead for what had become the United Democrats, an organisation that Hughes occupied a hugely senior role in. Leading into the 1999 elections, he was a key part of the campaign as one of Ashdown's principal lieutenants alongside Kennedy.

After the UD's landslide triumph in the 1999 election, Hughes' crucial role in the party was reflected in the role he received in government, being made Minister of Home Affairs. Nominally, he was now the second-most powerful man in government after Ashdown, Kennedy having been given the lesser role of Health Minister. Yet the office, as prestigious as it was, soon proved equally as challenging; the immigration crisis sparked by refugees fleeing syndicalist Europe across the Channel to the newly reformed Britain dominated a newly unmuzzled press, with headlines consistently critical of Hughes. With Ashdown wildly popular amongst the people, Hughes became a lightning rod of-sorts for all criticism of the new liberal government as the administration's second-in-command. The situation was only worsened by Charles Kennedy's ascension to Foreign Minister in 2002 - the affable, charming and immediately well-liked Kennedy proved a major challenge to Hughes' position as number two.