Ian Pearson

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Ian Phares Pearson (born 5 April 1959, West Midlands) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Labour member of Parliament for Dudley South.

He entered parliament for Dudley West (now Dudley South) in a by-election in 1994, which he served until boundary changes moved him to his present constituency in 1997.

Pearson served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson from 1997 until Robinson was forced to resign in 1998. In 2001 he returned to the government as a whip. In 2002 he moved to the Northern Ireland Office as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State. After the 2005 general election he was promoted to Minister of State for Trade in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

In the PM's 2006 reshuffle, he was appointed as Minister of State for Climate Change and Environment at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

On January 5, 2007, Pearson courted considerable controversy by publicly criticising several airlines, particularly Ryanair, for failing to pull their weight in lowering UK carbon emissions. He described Ryanair as "the irresponsible face of capitalism", despite considerable investment in environmentally-friendly planes and technologies, and the lowest fuel use per passenger figures of any British airline. In response, Michael O'Leary, the CEO of Ryanair, described Pearson as an "idiot minister", adding that Pearson didn't know what he was talking about.^[1]