John Townend
Yorkshire vintner who as Bridlington’s Tory MP courted controversy with his views on immigration
JOHN TOWNEND, who has died aged 84, was a wine merchant from Hull who for 22 years as Conservative MP for Bridlington and the surrounding area took a Right-wing stance on taxes, trade union reform, capital punishment, South Africa and, most controversially, race and immigration.
He was an instinctive supporter of Margaret Thatcher and chaired the 92 Group of Conservative MPS which set out to protect her legacy. Though a natural Eurosceptic, after John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty he stopped just short of open rebellion.
Townend was an outspoken opponent of multiculturalism. He declared in 1989 that “England must be reconquered for the English”, and weeks before his retirement from the Commons at the 2001 election was rebuked by William Hague for claiming Britain was being turned into a “mongrel race”.
He supported rugby tours of South Africa, and Pretoria’s creation of the supposedly independent black “homeland” of Bophuthatswana, but he did have his sticking points. He congratulated coal companies in South Africa who broke with apartheid, and refused to appear on the same platform as the British National Party.
Slight and a little dour, with receding hair and domed forehead, Townend was by training an accountant – showing on the Treasury & Civil Service select committee, in the words of the Telegraph’s Edward Pearce, a “constitutional aversion to wasting money”. He pressed for tax cuts, particularly for small businesses, and was one of a group of MPS who – it was suspected with Mrs Thatcher’s encouragement – pushed ministers to toughen successive rounds of trade union legislation.
Townend’s pet hate was the Dock Labour Scheme, which had created “jobs for life” and, in his view, “destroyed” his home port of Hull; his pressure on ministers contributed to its abolition in 1989. He was a fervent champion of East Yorkshire’s fishermen and of his constituency’s pig farmers, saying: “I have more pigs in my constituency than people, but I’m glad they don’t have the vote because they wouldn’t vote for me.”
John Ernest Townend was born in Hull on June 12 1934, the son of Charles Townend, who had built up the family wine business founded in 1906, and his wife Dorothy. Educated at Hymers College, Hull, he went on to study accountancy. He was then commissioned into the RAF for his National Service.
In 1959 he joined the House of Townend as its finance director, becoming managing director in 1961 and diversifying into related businesses, including hotels. On his election to Parliament, he became the company’s chairman. He also became a “name” at Lloyd’s.
Townend joined Cottingham Young Conservatives as a boy, becoming their chairman in 1951 and, two years later, chairman of Haltemprice YCS. He was elected to Hull city council in 1966, chairing its finance committee and the Humber Bridge Board. When Humberside County Council was created in 1973, he was elected leader of the Conservative group, and four years later leader of the council.
He fought his first seat – Hull North – in 1970, then prior to the 1979 election was chosen to fight Bridlington. When Mrs Thatcher swept to power that May, he took the seat by more than 15,000 votes.
At Westminster Townend chaired the Conservative Small Businesses Committee, and was for a time PPS to the Housing Minister Hugh Rossi. He called for sharp cuts in government spending, postal ballots for union elections and an end to pay “comparability” between the Civil Service and the private sector.
Townend made no secret of his support for Enoch Powell over immigration. In 1984 he suggested foreigners employed in British industry should be replaced by unemployed Britons, and when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, he called for the deportation of British Muslims who could not accept its publication.
He aroused the greatest controversy at the very end of his Commons career, after the Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook praised Britain’s growing multiculturalism. In a speech Townend called on second-generation immigrants to Britain to abandon their roots “rather than looking to a motherland abroad”. He went on to accuse the Commission for Racial Equality of “causing more racial problems than it solves”.
Many Conservatives were scandalised and Hague repudiated his comments, saying: “Multiculturalism is part of the strength of modern Britain.” But the Tory leader did not withdraw the whip from Townend, saying it would be a pointless gesture since he was on the point of retiring.
John Townend married his wife Jennifer in 1963. She survives him with their two sons and two daughters.
John Townend, born June 12 1934, died August 18 2018