Steve Baker (politician)

Steven John Baker (born 6 June 1971) is a British Conservative Party politician. He is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wycombe, having been elected in the 2010 general election. He has been a member of the executive of the 1922 Committee since May 2012.

Baker served in the Royal Air Force as an aerospace engineer from 1989–99. After leaving the RAF, he studied for a postgraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, later becoming a software engineer and consultant. He chose to enter politics after witnessing the financial crisis in 2008, having worked in the IT department at Lehman Brothers in Canary Wharf. He was elected MP for Wycombe in 2010.

Since entering Parliament, he has campaigned against bail-outs for the financial sector and central banking, against the construction of High Speed 2, and against British membership of the European Union. In June 2015, he became co-chairman of Conservatives for Britain, a campaigning organisation formed of eurosceptic MPs, alongside Conservative MEP David Campbell Bannerman.

He co-founded The Cobden Centre, on which he sits on the advisory board. He established and chairs the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Economics, Money and Banking and is vice-chair of the APPG for Aerospace. He sat on the Treasury Select Committee.

Education
Born in St Austell, Baker was educated at Poltair School in St Austell and St Austell Sixth Form College followed by the University of Southampton where he gained a BEng in Aerospace Engineering. He later studied at St Cross College, Oxford, where he earned an MSc in Computation.

Early career
On 3 September 1989 Baker was commissioned as an Acting Pilot Officer into the Engineering Branch of the Royal Air Force, having previously held the rank of Corporal, before being regraded as a Pilot Officer on 15 July 1992. Baker retired from the RAF on 1 August 1999 at his own request having attained the rank of Flight lieutenant. He later worked as a consulting software engineer and manager. He was head of consulting and product manager with DecisionSoft Ltd (now named CoreFiling) in Oxford, 2000–01.

He was appointed as Chief Technical Officer at BASDA Ltd, Great Missenden in 2002, a position he held until 2007. For a year from 2005 he was director of product development at CoreFiling Ltd, Oxford. He was the chief architect of global financing and asset service platforms at Lehman Brothers, 2006–08. He has been principal of Ambriel Consulting Ltd since 2001. He is a founding member of The Cobden Centre, an educational charity promoting Austrian economics. He has been an associate consultant with the Centre for Social Justice since 2008.

Parliamentary career
Baker was selected as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe on 31 October 2009, after former Conservative MP Paul Goodman stood down; it was the first seat for which Baker had sought selection. Baker held the seat for the Conservative Party. He received 23,423 votes – a vote share of 48.6%, higher than Goodman's 42.4% and 45.8% in the 2001 and 2005 general elections respectively. In 2010, he was appointed to the Transport Select Committee.

Baker is rated as one of the Conservatives' top 10 most rebellious MPs of the 2010 intake. He was nominated as a 'Newcomer of the Year' on ConservativeHome.

He was named as the most authoritative Member of Parliament on Twitter in January 2011.

In March 2011, Baker initiated an adjournment debate on the malicious prosecution of an operator of an independent mental health unit. Eventually, the Solicitor General Edward Garnier issued an apology.

Baker has campaigned for banking reform, calling for banks to re-adopt Generally Accepted Accounting Practice to account for devalued loans, as well as failed ones; in May 2011, he calculated that the use of IFRS instead of GAAP over-stated the strength of Royal Bank of Scotland's balance sheet by £25bn.

He introduced a Ten Minute Rule bill to 'bring casino banking into the light', by changing rules by which banks account for derivatives.

He was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee on 16 May 2012, saying he was 'fed up with factionalism' and wanted 'to stand as neither a modernising 301 candidate or a traditionalist'.

Baker was shortlisted for the Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award in 2015 for the founding of the Cobden Centre, and remains in the directory of the Grassroot Diplomat Who's Who publication.

Political positions
Baker rejects war as a policy, stating, "While clearly it has been breached repeatedly, the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1929 renounced war for the settlement of international disputes. It remains in force." Coupled with this, Baker is in favour of nuclear deterrents, on the grounds of "Van Creveld's argument that nuclear weapons make total war impossible".

Regarding parliamentary procedures, Baker wants to reform Early day motions (EDMs), possibly replacing them with "Members' Motions" on the grounds that EDMs 'are used to publicise the views of individual MPs', whereas a system such as 'Members' Motions' could be 'debated by the House'.

Baker describes his political inspiration as being the Liberal Richard Cobden, founding the Cobden Centre under the motto: 'Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less'. He has spoken about the free trade opportunities for the U.K. post-Brexit, but has warned of the need to protect against the trade policies of other countries, including China.

Despite being MP for a constituency through which High Speed 2 is not planned to run, Baker opposes the construction of the line against the party Whip. He argues that the plan does not 'make sense for the whole country', and, while believing that the route should not run through Buckinghamshire, campaigns to scrap the plans altogether, rather than re-routing them outside the county.

Baker opposes quantitative easing, saying it creates a worse crisis as an inevitable consequence.

He voted in opposition to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, and called for the denationalisation of marriage. He argued that the current situation risks infringing both the freedoms of the religious and LGBT communities, and that private individuals should define the term marriage, rather than the state.

Baker was in favour of Brexit prior to the 2016 referendum. He stated at a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance taking place in 2010 that he "think[s] the European Union needs to be wholly torn down", considering it "an obstacle to" "free trade and peace among all the nations of Europe as well as the world".