Since the start of 2000, when it began collecting detailed data, that’s a 7.6 per cent fall. What to buy as a last-minute present? How to seem as if you’re splashing out on that relative or friend, without actually doing so? In the past it was always easy – nip in to a record shop and buy a CD, whose price tag of around £15 was nicely positioned between a large box of chocolates (too cheap) and a decorative vase (too expensive, especially Grayson Perry’s).
But now the British Phonographic Industry has revealed that half of all CDs now sell for under £10. He wanted the Chancellor to place an increasing emphasis on the importance of the traditional family: Traditional family life has been the bedrock of our society and the move away from it in recent years has led to so much juvenile delinquency, with all the side-effects of drugs, homelessness and educational attainment.Islwyn was a genuine and an ideal “people’s peer”.Tam Dalyell. That’s all I wanted.” Alan Howarth was duly selected.Islwyn proved himself a most useful member of the Upper House. In his maiden speech on 3 December 1997 he commended the Government for helping pensioners on winter fuel bills.

He said: “I went to a certain [Shadow] minister and he in turn went to Tony Blair and the message came back that he was definitely prepared to send me to the Lords. Lord Islwyn, as he had become, explained that he had put out a feeler “to the party hierarchy”. It was put around that he had been offered a peerage so that Tony Blair could spatchcock in to the safe seat of Newport East the former Tory Minister Alan Howarth, who became a Social Security Minister and then Arts Minister in the Labour government. For the rest of his life he was to argue the case of the Palestinian people.It was widely assumed in 1997 that he would stand again but at the last moment he was involved in what became known as the “seats for peerages” strategy. Three years later he was one of a group of pro-Arab Labour MPs who met Yasser Arafat. For a brief period, 1974-75, he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to his friend Fred Mulley, first at Transport and then at Defence.On a host of regional issues such as Inmos, the Severn Bridge and the problems of Newport Docks he showed great skill in bringing them to national attention.Hughes provoked intense anger among parliamentary colleagues in July 1972 when he seemed to excuse the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games and suggested that it was comparable to “the cruel injustice to the Palestinian people”. He was stalwart in opposing Margaret Thatcher, who wished to stop British participation in the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and mobilised much political and trade union opinion to support Sir Denis Follows and Charles Palmer of the British Olympic Committee in their decision to send a team.Hughes vigorously opposed entry to the European Community in October 1971 and was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party Europe Group as a representative of the anti-marketeers in the early 1970s.

His first activity in this area was opposition of the visit of rugby players to Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, in October 1967. He was later to become chairman of a Parliamentary Labour Party Sports Group for 10 years, 1974-84. In a powerful speech in May 1969 he said that Transport and General Workers members would back Jack Jones, their General Secretary, rather than Castle’s White Paper In Place of Strife.One of Hughes’s consuming preoccupations was the politics of sport. He introduced a Dismissal Appeal Board Bill in 1967, strongly opposed to the idea of wage control being argued by Harold Wilson and his senior ministers. He was a champion of British steelworkers, losing no opportunity to praise both their skill and the effort that they put into their job.As a new MP, he was one of the leaders of opposition to the Prices and Incomes Bill that was put forward by Barbara Castle. Throughout his public life Hughes was intimately involved in the problems of the steel industry and was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party Steel Group for 20 years, from 1977 until 1997.

It imports vast quantities of iron ore: although this is a valuable traffic, it would seem to be tempting fate to rely so exclusively on this one form of trade.Many of his constituents were employed at the great steel plant of Llan-wern. In his maiden speech to the Commons on 25 May 1966, Hughes spoke on the Finance Bill: Nowadays, the industrial pattern and organisation of the Newport area has considerably changed and my constituency tends to be increasingly reliant on the steel industry. In a year of high tide for Labour, Hughes beat Peter (now Lord) Temple-Morris by 32,098 votes to 21,599. He immediately went down the Nine Mile Pit in 1940 and stayed until 1943 when he joined the Army. Moving to Coventry, he was employed by the Standard Motor Company, latterly as an administrative officer, with which job he could combine his work as a prominent city councillor and shop steward.Dick Crossman, in whose constituency he was active, found him difficult, as a very left-wing officer of the party, but predicted that he would be a useful MP when he was chosen to succeed Sir Frank Soskice, Harold Wilson’s first Home Secretary, in Newport in 1966. He insisted on the recognition of the dignity of union members, particularly those of the T and G.Hughes was born into a mining family and went to school in Pontllan-fraith, to the north-west of Newport. Coming from the factory floor to the House of Commons, he understood intimately the problem of the blue- collar worker and the skilled workers.