Giles Radice


Giles Heneage Radice, Baron Radice, PC is a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was previously a Member of Parliament from 1973 to 2001.

Early life

Radice was educated at Winchester College and Magdalen College, Oxford. He worked as a research officer for the General and Municipal Workers' Union.

Parliamentary career

Radice first stood for Parliament at Chippenham in 1964 and 1966, but came third each time. He was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Chester-le-Street from a 1973 by-election to 1983 and then North Durham until his retirement in 2001.
Radice served as Education spokesman in the Labour Shadow Cabinet under Neil Kinnock in the 1980s. As chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Radice helped make the monetary policy committee of the Bank of England accountable to both Parliament and the people for its decisions over interest rates. He was a member of the House of Lords European Union Sub-Committee on external affairs until March 2015.
A europhile, Radice was one of only five Labour MPs to vote for the Third Reading of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, defying his party Whip, which was to abstain.
He was made a Life Peer as Baron Radice, of Chester-le-Street in the County of Durham, on 16 July 2001.

Writing and political ideas

As an advocate of the need for Labour to ditch traditional dogmas, Radice was something of a precursor to Tony Blair. In his 1989 book Labour's Path to Power: The New Revisionism, Radice set out his vision for a modernised Labour Party, which included abandoning Clause IV of the party constitution. His highly influential and widely quoted Southern Discomfort pamphlet in 1992 also argued the case for reform. Using focus group evidence, Radice found that voters in the south believed that Labour was out of touch, extremist and against aspiration.
Philip Stephens later wrote in the Financial Times, "At that time, Giles Radice, then an MP, wrote a brilliant essay on what he called Labour's 'southern discomfort'. The party would not win, he argued, unless and until it managed to connect its ambitions for social justice with the individualistic aspirations of the voters in southern England. Here was the template for Mr Blair." Radice returned to this theme following Labour's 2010 defeat: his Southern Discomfort Again pamphlet found that voters perceived that Labour had run out of steam, were out of touch, unfair and poorly led. In this pamphlet and in Southern Discomfort: One Year On, Radice warned that the 'southern problem' is more than geographical: social change means that Labour support collapsed in other areas, including the Midlands. A committed pro-European, Radice has for many years been a leading member both of the European Movement and Britain in Europe, and wrote a polemic called Offshore in 1992, in which he put the case for Britain in Europe.
After his retirement as an MP in 2001 Radice, wrote Friends and Rivals, an acclaimed triple biography of three modernisers from an earlier generation — Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, and Anthony Crosland, arguing that their failure to work more closely together had harmed the modernising cause. This was followed by The Tortoise and the Hares, a comparative biography of Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison. Trio: Inside the Blair, Brown, Mandelson Project was published in 2010. In a review of Trio, Andrew Blick wrote that, "With his previous work Friends and Rivals and The Tortoise and the Hares, Radice developed a distinctive approach to contemporary history, using group biography....Radice adds to his historical approach not only a readable writing style, but the judgements of an experienced Labour politician."

Other positions

Lord Radice has been a member of the advisory board of the Centre for British Studies of Berlin's Humboldt University since 1998.
He is a member of the Fabian Society. He is a former Chair of the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe, and was Chair of the European Movement, 1995–2001. He is also a former Chairman of Policy Network, the international progressive thinktank based in London.