Joe Ashton

Joseph William Ashton OBE (9 October 1933 – 30 March 2020) was a British Labour Party politician who was the MP for Bassetlaw from 1968 to 2001.

[2][3] Ashton was first elected as the Member of Parliament for Bassetlaw in a by-election in 1968, when he struggled to hold the seat (which had been Labour-held since 1929) at a time when the government of Harold Wilson was unpopular.

Ashton argued that the Labour government's approach, which included redundancy payments to miners over the age of 55, was better than the terms of the Conservatives when they were in power (1951–1964).

[3] In March 1999, Northamptonshire's Chief Constable noted that Ashton had given misleading information to officers when in the same premises of the arrests of the perpetrators of immigration and sexual offences at a Northampton Thai massage parlour.

The police robustly denied that it had leaked Ashton's name; their statement said, "there were a great many other people with knowledge of this case - defendants, witnesses, legal representatives, other organisations and other individuals.