Name Patrick Ground Role British Politician | Party Conservative Party | |
Reginald Patrick Ground, known as Patrick Ground QC (born 9 August 1932) is a British Conservative politician and barrister.
Contents
Political career
Ground served as a councillor on the London Borough of Hammersmith 1968-1971, representing Parson's Green ward. In April 2015 he was selected locally to take the ceremonial role of president of the Feltham and Heston Conservative Association.
Ground stood as the Conservative candidate for the Feltham and Heston seat seven times, a seat made up of the western half of the electorate of the London Borough of Hounslow, between February 1974 and 1997. He won the successive elections in 1983 and 1987. He lost in 1992 to Alan Keen (Labour Co-operative). A backbencher, he spoke often on subjects of local government and planning. He advocated collectivist social advancement, opposing greater direct redistribution of income and wealth. As such in the House of Commons he argued strongly against measuring poverty primarily in relative terms, saying:
It seems unsatisfactory to define poverty solely by reference to average incomes because if that were the true position, Labour Members could eliminate poverty completely--if they were able to do so--by expropriating all incomes of, say, 50 per cent. of average incomes or above. That would make for a tremendous reduction in poverty, according to the definition of Opposition Members, but nobody would be any happier or better off. It might please those with egalitarian passions, but it would not add anything to the good of the country.
Legal career
His specialist area of advocacy is planning law and he was called to the Bar in 1960; he was appointed Queens Counsel in 1981. In 2015 he practised from his home address in Fulham.
Personal life and The Fulham Society
He married Caroline Dugdale in 1964. In the 1980s he chaired the cross-party Fulham Society, a residents' association and remained a vice president into the 2010s decade with three others: a younger MP of his party, Andy Slaughter MP (Lab) and another former West London MP Lord Carrington.