Giles Heneage Radice, Baron Radice (4 October 1936 – 25 August 2022) was a British Labour Party politician and author. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1973 to 2001, representing part of County Durham, and then as a life peer in the House of Lords from 2001 until shortly before his death in 2022.
Early life
Radice was born in London on 4 October 1936, the son of a civil servant in the Indian Government, Lawrence Radice. His mother, Patricia, was the daughter of Conservative politician Arthur Heneage. His national service was with the Coldstream Guards.
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.
He was made a life peer as Baron Radice, of Chester-le-Street in the County of Durham, on 16 July 2001. He retired from the House of Lords on 1 August 2022.
Writing and political ideas
As an advocate for Labour to ditch traditional dogmas, Radice has been described as a forerunner to Tony Blair. His 1992 pamphlet "Southern Discomfort" also made a case for reform, arguing that Labour did not appear supportive of economic aspiration, and this was costing them support from working class voters in Southern England, particularly London.</blockquote>
Radice returned to this theme following Labour's 2010 defeat: his "Southern Discomfort Again" pamphlet (with Patrick Diamond) found that voters perceived that Labour had run out of steam, were out of touch (particularly on immigration), unfair and poorly led. In this pamphlet and in "Southern Discomfort: One Year On" (2011), 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 was 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 (2002) and The Tortoise and the Hares (2008), 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 had been a member of the advisory board of the Centre for British Studies of Berlin's Humboldt University since 1998. He was also a member of the Fabian Society.
Radice died from cancer on 25 August 2022, at age 85.
- Community socialism. Fabian Society, London. 1979
- Equality and quality: a socialist plan for education. Fabian Society, London. 1986
- The Tortoise and the Hares: Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison Politicos Publishing, 2008,
- Trio: Inside the Blair, Brown, Mandelson Project I.B.Tauris, 2010,
- Southern Discomfort Fabian Society, 1992, 978-0716305552