MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands: MPs visit scheduled for the second week of November

Yvonne Fovargue MP for Makerfield, North West, is Labour shadow Defense minister

Two UK MPs Yvonne Fovargue (L) and Guy Opperman (C) will be visiting the Falkland Islands from 13 to 18 November, accompanied by Falklands government representative in London, Sukey Cameron MBE.

 A full agenda of interviews and visits with government, the private sector and at MPA has been programmed for the two MPs who have a special interest in the Falklands.

Ms Fovargue from Makerfield, North West, is shadow Defense minister having reached parliament after winning a women-only selection to succeed the former Minister Ian McCartney who stood down through ill-health (and after problems with his expenses) in 2010. She is the first female MP for the former mining constituency.

In October 2011 MP Fovargue was promoted to be an assistant Opposition Whip and fifteen months later she was named to the frontbench as a junior Shadow Transport Minister to replace John Woodcock who stood down after an injury. In October 2013, she moved to be a Shadow Defense Minister.

MP Opperman represents Hexham, North East and is PPS to James Brokenshire as Minister of State for Security and Immigration, Home Office, and has declared among countries of interests the Falklands, India and Syria.

Opperman farmed in Africa for a year and was a director of his family’s engineering business before pursuing a career as a barrister, a profession he has held for more than 20 years. He has prosecuted and defended in many murder trials. He received his first experience of Westminster politics when he was an adviser to Michael Ancram as Shadow Foreign Secretary between 2001 and 2005.

A member of the Society of Conservative Lawyers, Opperman said he became a lawyer because he was not good enough to be a professional steeplechase jockey, and because his first novel was turned down.

Opperman won the Bar Council’s pro bono publico award in 2007 – presented by the Labor peer Lord Goldsmith – for his work setting up free legal clinics for victim support and citizen’s advice organizations in the West Country, and for unpaid work fighting a successful test case challenging the closure of parts of a Wiltshire hospital.

A Kennet councilor in Wiltshire for four years between 1995 and 1999, Opperman contested the unpromising Swindon North in 1997 and the even less promising Welsh nationalist stronghold of Caernarfon in 2005, coming fourth with 12% of the vote. Opperman was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Northumberland seat of Hexham at the 2010 General Election. Chosen in 2008, he had also been shortlisted for the Bournemouth West seat.

Radically to the Left of his party on tax, he has called for the abolition of income tax for anybody on the minimum wage, to be paid for by a “mansion tax” on the sale of properties worth over £2 million.

In 2011 after surgery he initiated a debate on the future of the Falkland Islands, in which he was critical of the Foreign Office, calling for more robust diplomacy.