Mark F. Watts
British politician (born 1964)
Mark Francis Watts (born 11 June 1964, in London), is a former Labour Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP), and now public affairs lobbyist and public relations advisor, having represented Kent East and South East England from 1994 to 2004.
Early years
Watts attended Maidstone Grammar School and MidKent College and studied economics, BSc & MSc (Econ), at the London School of Economics. He worked for the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames covering planning, transport and economic development.
Political life
Watts was elected as a Maidstone Borough Councillor in 1986, and became Leader of its Labour Group in 1990. He was elected an MEP in 1994, gaining the East Kent Constituency for Labour from the Conservatives, beating incumbent Christopher Jackson, and stood again successfully for the South East England regional constituency in 1999, but was not re-elected in 2004 when Labour's national performance declined.
He specialised in transport issues, being Labour Transport and Tourism Spokesman in the European Parliament for eight years. He served on the Committee on Transport and Tourism and then the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism. He was a champion of enlargement and the application of the Copenhagen Criteria to Central and Eastern and the islands of Malta and Cyprus. He was vice-chair, first of the Delegation to the EU-Bulgaria Joint Parliamentary Committee and then of the Delegation to the EU-Malta Joint Parliamentary Committee. He was Rapporteur on a number of important pieces of EU legislation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mark F. Watts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.