Neale Hanvey

Neale Hanvey
Born	James Neale Hanvey 28 December 1964
Party	SNP, ALBA
Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath In office 12 December 2019 - Present

James Neale Hanvey (born 28 December 1964) is a Scottish Alba Party politician who has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath since the UK/2019 General Election. Formerly a member of the Scottish National Party (SNP), he defected from the SNP to ALBA in March 2021. He was the SNP member and spokesperson on the Health and Social Care Select Committee and he was briefly Shadow Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment.

Early life and career

Born in Belfast, Hanvey was the son of James Stafford Hanvey and Mary Isobel (Ismay) Hanvey (née Withers). He was educated at Glenrothes High School before starting a twenty-five year career in the National Health Service. In 2005, he was appointed as divisional nurse director for rare cancer at the Royal Marsden Hospital. He has been a contributing author to medical textbooks.

Political career

After returning to Scotland in 2012, Hanvey was elected as a Scottish National Party councillor in the 2012 Scottish local elections for the Dunfermline Central ward in Fife. During his time as a councillor, Hanvey was the SNP spokesperson for health and social care, SNP group convener, and latterly SNP group leader in 2017, but lost his seat at the 2017 local elections. In October 2019, he was selected as the SNP candidate for the Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituency at the UK/2019 General Election.

Suspension and re-admission to the SNP

In November 2019, he was suspended from the party following allegations that he made antisemitic social media posts two years earlier, in which he compared Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the treatment of Jews during the Second World War and shared a newspaper article that included an image of George Soros that drew on an antisemitic trope.<refhttps://web.archive.org/web/20191214160601/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50770830</ref> As a result, the SNP withdrew support for his campaign, but he remained as the party candidate on the ballot paper because the 14 November 2019 deadline for nominations had already passed. Hanvey accepted the suspension and apologised for the offending posts, stating that he was "genuinely and deeply sorry" and that "Although I do not in anyway consider myself anti-Semitic, on reflection the language I used was, and this is clearly unacceptable."

Neale Hanvey was elected as MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath at the UK/2019 General Election, gaining the seat from the Scottish Labour Party's shadow Scottish Secretary Lesley Laird by a majority of 1,243 votes. He sat as an Independent MP upon his election.

During his suspension from the SNP, Hanvey was advised by the Antisemitism Policy Trust (APT) and attended several APT activities in Parliament. He also appeared before the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities to apologise in person and thank them for their "generosity of spirit and willingness to help" during this time.

In March 2020, the SNP's conduct committee agreed that Hanvey should be readmitted to the party in May 2020. The SNP released a statement on 2 June to confirm that Hanvey's six-month suspension from the party had ended on 27 May and that he would now join the SNP Westminster Group to sit as an SNP MP.

On 2 July 2020 it was announced that Hanvey had been appointed as the SNP member and spokesperson for the Westminster Health and Social Care Select Committee. In November 2020, a year after his suspension, Hanvey was elected to the SNP's Member Conduct Committee.

In February 2021, Hanvey lost his role as the SNP's vaccine spokesperson after publicly backing a crowdfunding campaign for a defamation case against several individuals, including SNP MP Kirsty Blackman. The campaign's creator, who had been planning to sue a number of people for referring to comments she had made as antisemitic, did not pursue the case to court.

Exit from the SNP

In March 2021, Neale Hanvey left the SNP to join the newly formed Alba Party and then stood as a candidate in the Mid Scotland and Fife region. Neither he nor {{ALBA]] succeeded in gaining a seat.

Since joining the Alba Party, Hanvey has not voted in the House of Commons.

Views

Neale Hanvey has signed the SNP Women's Pledge, which originated amongst members of the SNP. The pledge opposes the Scottish Government's proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in Scotland which would allow transgender people to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate on the basis of a statutory self-declaration, rather than the existing Gender Recognition Panel which require the involvement of a medical expert. Hanvey has said that he is supportive of transgender rights, "but can't accept that one group achieves equality by trampling the hard won rights & protections of another group", and said he is "frustrated that some refuse to see the risks of self ID despite the evidence it will be abused by sexual predators." Challenged on these comments by the LGBT news organisation Pink Saltire, Hanvey said that women's legitimate concerns were not being heard on the issue of GRA.

In April 2021, Hanvey shared an article falsely claiming the SNP were channelling public funding to organisations campaigning to lower the age of consent to 10. The SNP described these claims as "deeply homophobic and untrue", they were also condemned by Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie.

In May 2021, Neale Hanvey expressed his support and solidarity with Craig Murray who had been found guilty of contempt of court after writing blogs that risked prejudicing Alex Salmond's trial for sexual assault and breaching the court-protected anonymity of complainants. During sentencing the judge, Lady Dorrian, said Murray's actions struck at the heart of fair administration of justice and created a risk that future complainers in high-profile sexual assault cases would be reluctant to come forward. Responding to the sentencing, Hanvey claimed that "perjurers will now be emboldened & a powerful protected elite become increasingly authoritarian & ruthless" and said a "reckoning must come":

The worrying impact on criminal justice this will have is that perjurers will now be emboldened & a powerful protected elite become increasingly authoritarian & ruthless. Power corrupts & absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never been more evident. A reckoning must come

Personal life

Hanvey is one of 45 openly LGBT MPs. He lives in Fife with his partner, Avelino del Carmen Prado Cortes, and two sons. The couple have been together since 1994, and entered into a civil partnership in 2011.

He lists his recreations as "composing electronic music" (have previously released material under the name 'Security Blue'), swimming, music, film".

 

A Document by Neale Hanvey

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:Towards the future	Article	12 May 2021	Alba Party Scottish National Party 2021 Scottish Parliament election	Attendance in the House of Commons will be when it affords an opportunity to promote Scottish interests, not a routine sojourn to London. There’s plenty work to be doing in our constituencies and across Scotland, and that’ll be our focus. We’ll vote when appropriate on issues as they arise.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 18 May 2021.
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