Concannon, Don (John Dennis)

by Lawrence William White

Concannon, Don (John Dennis) (1930–2003), British politician and Northern Ireland minister, was born 16 May 1930 at 6 Aberconway Crescent, Rossington, Yorkshire, England, son of James Dennis Concannon, a miner, and his wife Mary Elizabeth (née Spencer). He received primary and secondary education in Rossington, and took a City and Guilds course at Doncaster Technical College. He spent six years on regular service in the Coldstream Guards (1947–53), attaining the rank of lance‑corporal (1950), and serving in Palestine, Libya, Cyprus, and on guard and ceremonial duties in London. Leaving the army after his marriage, he worked as a miner in Rufford colliery, near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (1953–66), and was elected a workmen's pit inspector in 1964. He took a four‑year, part‑time adult education course at Nottingham university, studying politics, economics, and trade unionism. Becoming active in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Labour party, he was an NUM Rufford branch official (1960–65), and was elected to Mansfield town council (1962–6).

In March 1966 he was hurriedly selected as a parliamentary candidate when the constituency's sitting Labour MP announced his retirement two weeks into the general election campaign; increasing the party's majority by some 5,000 votes to nearly 19,000, Concannon was elected MP for Mansfield (1966–87); he worked his last shift on the coalface a fortnight before his election to parliament. His early reputation as a Labour leftist was largely based on his implacable opposition to the Vietnam war, and his defence, as an NUM‑sponsored MP, of trade‑union prerogatives. After only eighteen months on the backbenches, he was appointed an assistant government whip for the East Midlands (1968–70). On Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, he was made a senior opposition whip (1970–74). He staunchly supported the NUM during the national coal strikes of 1972 and 1974. When the latter precipitated a general election that unexpectedly produced a minority Labour government, Concannon served briefly as vice‑chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household (March–June 1974) – effectively the government's pairing whip. His duties included preparing a daily briefing summary of House of Commons proceedings for Queen Elizabeth; 'I have talked to her many times', the former Guardsman observed at the time of his appointment, 'but only on parade' (Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2003).

From early in his parliamentary career Concannon was interested in Northern Ireland, motivated in part by having ancestral roots in Ireland. When the collapse of the Sunningdale power‑sharing executive, and the consequent resumption of direct rule of NI by Westminster, necessitated a strengthening of ministerial numbers in the NI Office, Concannon was made a parliamentary under‑secretary of state for NI (June 1974–April 1976), serving under Merlyn Rees (1920–2006), and was given responsibility for housing, local government, and planning (portfolios eventually merged into a single Department of the Environment). On the accession of James Callaghan to the prime ministership, Concannon was promoted to minister of state for NI (1976–9), initially assigned responsibility for environment, health and social services, and agriculture (April–September 1976). In a subsequent reshuffle, he was made deputy to the new secretary of state, Roy Mason, and responsible for commerce, manpower services, EEC matters, criminal compensation, and prison administration and operation (September 1976–May 1979). Features of Concannon's brief placed him at the centre of the Labour government's policy toward the political conflict in Northern Ireland. Alongside an intense security crackdown, a key component of the government's strategy was to reduce social discontent, especially in the nationalist community, by expanding employment opportunities in industries financed by external investment, in pursuit of which Concannon visited the USA, Germany, and Scandinavia. Such efforts were eventually overshadowed by his central role in securing the ill‑fated agreement (1978) between the British government and the DeLorean Motor Company (headed by the flamboyant American auto industry magnate John DeLorean (1925–2005)) for a car factory outside Belfast, a project that Concannon strenuously promoted despite the caution advised by some observers; failing to begin production till 1981, the company collapsed in financial chaos in 1982.

In the prisons aspect of his brief, Concannon presided over implementation of the government policy of criminalising republican and loyalist prisoners convicted of offences in the courts by withdrawing the special category status accorded to such prisoners by the Conservative government in 1972 after a thirty‑five‑day republican prisoners' hunger strike. The refusal by many republicans imprisoned in Long Kesh to cooperate with the new regime by wearing prison uniforms resulted in the 'blanket protest' (1976). In response to efforts – often severe, and by turns petty and physically brutal – by prison authorities to break the protest and enforce cooperation, the prisoners escalated their resistance into the 'no-wash protest' and the 'dirty protest' (1978). The prisons policy aroused controversy not only among Irish republicans and their supporters overseas, but also among many nationalists, human rights advocates, and the left‑wing of the British Labour party; Concannon refused to allow a group of Labour backbenchers to visit Long Kesh, suspecting them of wanting to make political capital at the government's expense. He defended officers in Castlereagh detention centre against charges of engaging in brutal interrogation techniques. As the government's slim parliamentary majority ebbed away in 1978–9, he was travelling constantly between Belfast and London, to be available for commons votes in Westminster, then returning immediately to his ministerial duties in Stormont. On leaving office after Labour's defeat in the May 1979 general election, Concannon – who was appointed a privy councillor in 1978 – was the longest serving minister to date in the NI Office (one month short of five years, a record since eclipsed).

Concannon became opposition spokesman on defence (1979–80), his tenure marked by bitter conflicts within the Labour party over nuclear disarmament. When Michael Foot assumed the party leadership, he was moved to opposition spokesman on Northern Ireland (1980–83), a position he preferred. He was involved with the party study group that developed the principle of supporting Irish unification through consent, adopted as party policy in 1981, and re‑affirmed in the 1983 general election manifesto. However, his and the party's positions on immediate, topical Northern Ireland issues alienated nationalist opinion and the Labour left. He articulated the party's continuing opposition to any concessions to republican prisoners on the issue of political status, a position maintained throughout the H‑block hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. He chastised American sympathisers who donated money to prisoners' support organisations, asserting that some of the funds were directed by the republican movement toward procurement of weapons and explosives. He accused Labour leftists who supported the hunger strikers' demands of giving aid and succour to terrorists. On the day of the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by‑election (9 April 1981) that elected hunger‑striker Bobby Sands (qv) to the seat, Concannon on the floor of the commons urged voters in the constituency to reject the candidacy, declaring that a vote for Sands was 'a vote of approval' for the murderers of Lord Mountbatten and the perpetrators of other atrocities. On 1 May 1981, four days before Sands's death, Concannon visited each of the four hunger strikers individually in Long Kesh, urging them to come off their strike, and advising them that the Labour party fully supported the Conservative government's policy not to concede to the prisoners' demands; afterwards he explained that his purpose was to clarify any confusion in the strikers' minds regarding the position of the parliamentary Labour party. The visit was widely criticised; SDLP leader John Hume called it 'a cheap and offensive publicity stunt' before the lenses of the international news media, and accused Concannon of being out of touch with the nuances of political opinion in the North (Ir. Times, 2 May 1981). Tam Dalyell claims that Concannon – who, he argues, was sympathetic 'at heart' to Irish constitutional nationalism, and favoured a link between NI and the Republic – was 'genuinely distressed' when asked by Foot to make the visit (Independent, 19 December 2003).

Concannon supported the Tory government's 'rolling devolution' initiative of 1982, to which he secured modifications intended to make the scheme more palatable to the SDLP (which nonetheless rejected it for lacking an effective Irish dimension). At the 1982 Labour party conference he failed to block a motion calling for a ban on the use of plastic bullets throughout the UK, describing their use by security forces against Molotov cocktails as a 'lesser evil'. He was weakened politically by the collapse in December 1982 of the DeLorean car company, and subsequent revelations about the cost of the failed project to the British exchequer (estimates range from £50 million to £85 million). In the June 1983 general election his majority in the erstwhile supremely safe Labour seat dwindled to just over 2,000 votes. Removed from the front bench by the new party leader, Neil Kinnock (October 1983), he was defeated in the election for deputy chief whip.

During the British miners' strike of 1984–5, Concannon vigorously supported the non‑striking majority of Nottinghamshire miners (who voted by three‑to‑one in an area ballot against striking), condemned intimidation of working miners, and defended actions taken by police against flying pickets from other areas. Derided by one fellow Labour MP as a 'copper's nark', he departed from his habitual amiability by threatening to strike another Labour MP who called working miners 'scabs'. His attempted defence of the working Notts miners at the 1984 Labour conference was shouted down by NUM delegates and their supporters, to the extent that the chair, unable to control the rowdy proceedings, asked him to step down. Concannon maintained that Notts miners would have respected a strike vote had there been a national ballot, even if their own area had voted not to strike, but refused to bend before outside pressure in the absence of a national vote. His support of the Notts‑based breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) deprived him of his NUM sponsorship, and further weakened his already precarious chances for re‑election. His political career effectively ended when he suffered serious injuries in an automobile accident (October 1985), which determined his decision not to stand for re‑election. In his last commons speech (the first after the accident), he defied Labour's three‑line whip to vote for the Conservative government's coal industry bill, because it accorded the UDM equal rights with the NUM on miners' charitable bodies (November 1986). He declined to endorse the leftist Labour candidate for Mansfield in the 1987 general election (who held the seat by 56 votes, amid the entry of a UDM official standing as 'moderate labour').

Concannon's military background coloured his attitudes and stiffened his resolution in addressing NI security issues both in government and in opposition. His position as NI spokesman, combined with his being an NUM‑sponsored MP in a Nottinghamshire constituency, placed him in the crucible at two especially heated points of conflict during the bitterly contentious and discordant struggle of the early 1980s between traditionalists and the militant left for control of the British Labour party. He was one of the first British politicians to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation as legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people; his views on the Middle East conflict were profoundly influenced by his immediate experience, as a foot soldier in Palestine during the last days of the British Mandate, of the activities of Jewish paramilitary groups, such as the Irgun and the Lehi (Stern gang).

Concannon was a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (1986–94), and supported the interests of retired members of the Palestine Police Force (which dated from the Mandate). Six feet four inches in height, and weighing seventeen stone, he was highly adept at basketball, a sport he took up while in the army, and in which he represented the Guards and Nottinghamshire, and was an England trialist. His other recreations included cricket, soccer, swimming, and poker. He married (1953) Iris May Wilson, a shoe worker and miner's daughter from Mansfield; they had two sons and two daughters. He died 14 December 2003 of cancer in a Nottinghamshire hospice.