Lord Steel of Aikwood to Speak
at SFU Centre for Scottish Studies
VANCOUVER - The Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to announce that Lord Steel of Aikwood will visit Vancouver in April to deliver a public lecture entitled "The Scottish Parliament: Its origins, what is does and where it is going."
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LORD STEEL OF AIKWOOD
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Lord Steel's lecture will be delivered a month before the much anticipated Scottish Parliamentary election which will shape Scotland's future.
David Steel was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, the son of a Church of Scotland minister who became Moderator of the Church of Scotland in 1974.
He studied at Edinburgh University and was president of the Liberal Club, and of the Students' Representative Council. Thereafter he was assistant secretary of the Scottish Liberal Party 1962-1964 before joining the BBC as a reporter/presenter.
That career was cut short by his winning the by-election in March 1965 in Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles from the Conservatives. At 26 he became the youngest Member of that Parliament.
He continued to represent the Scottish Borders (the seat later became Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale) through eight further elections until he retired in 1997. He was then elevated to the House of Lords as Lord Steel of Aikwood in the dissolution honours.
Lord Steel was also the founding Scottish Chairman of Shelter, the campaigning charity for the homeless. From 1966 to 1970 he was president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. In 1971 he was expelled from Rhodesia and declared a prohibited immigrant by the illegal Smith regime.
In 1992 he was an observer at South Africa's first democratic election and in 1997 was appointed by the Commonwealth Secretary General to Chair the Commonwealth Observer Mission to the second election. He continued to be active in the development of multi-party democracy in Kenya, and later also in Malawi.
From 1970-1975 he was Liberal Chief Whip and in 1976 was the first party leader in Britain to be elected by vote of party members in the country, not just MPs. He welcomed the founding of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and led his party into alliance with it, leading in 1988 to union as the Liberal Democrats.
From 1989-99 he was joint-chair of the Scottish Constitutional Convention which drew up the blueprint for the re-establishment within the United Kingdom of the Scottish Parliament (abolished in 1707), and on which basis the Blair government legislated.
He became a list member for the Lothian Region in the new parliament and was elected its first Presiding Officer (Speaker). He retired at the end of that first
parliament in 2003 and returned to the House of Lords without portfolio.
He was knighted in 1990 and also holds the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of Germany, Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur of France, and the Order of the Brilliant Star of Taiwan. In 2004 he was appointed by Her Majesty as one of the 16 Knights of the Thistle (KT).
Lord Steel lives in the Scottish Borders at Aikwood Tower, near Selkirk, a Sixteenth Century tower house which he and Judy restored in 1992.
Lord Steel's lecture will be held at SFU at Harbour Centre on April 4 at 7:30 PM and will be followed by a reception. The lecture is free but seating is limited. To reserve a seat, call (604) 291-5100.
[The Centre for Scottish Studies speaker's series is supported by the British High Commission in Ottawa, the British Consulate in Vancouver, the St. Andrew's and Caledonian Society of Vancouver, SFU History Student Union, and Mary Macaree.]
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