Battleaxe - Dame Margaret Hodge

Born in Alexandria in 1944 to Jewish parents from Germany and Austria, Margaret arrived in England aged four – stateless, foreign, and an outsider. Those origins shaped everything. Her grandmother was murdered by the Nazis. Her grandfather was greeted as an enemy alien and then interned on British soil. Anti-racism was written into Hodge's DNA.So was the instinct to battle back.Over more than fifty years as an elected representative – councillor, council leader, MP and minister – she fought on every front. Against the old guard of the Labour right and the bullying hard left. Against Margaret Thatcher's assault on local government. Against the BNP, when Nick Griffin came to Barking to take her seat. Against Jeremy Corbyn and the antisemitism that infected her beloved party. And against the oligarchs, tax avoiders, money launderers and kleptocrats who have used Britain as their playground.As chair of the Public Accounts Committee, she transformed a dry accounting exercise into one of the most feared scrutiny bodies in British public life. When a senior Google executive sat before her committee, she invoked the company's famous motto saying: 'You say you "do no evil" – but I think you do do evil, in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax.' It was that kind of directness – applied equally to Amazon, Starbucks, Goldman Sachs and HSBC – that made tax avoidance a matter of public outrage rather than private cleverness. As Britain's first Children's Minister,
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