Lord Dick Taverne, a one-time Labour Minister turned Lib Dem peer, has died at the great age of 97 – and with him has passed the once leading force of social democracy in British politics.
A Charterhouse and Balliol College Oxford educated intellectua, Taverne was a barrister who entered Parliament as Labour MP for Lincoln at a by-election in 1962, and quickly rose to be a minister in Harold Wilson’s government of the late 1960s, serving as a Home Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury.
Taverne had the distinction of being both the first social democrat to leave Labour because of its swing to the left, and (apart from David Owen), the last survivor of those rebels who broke with the party to create the SDP.
In those distant days, Labour was strongly anti-European. In 1973 Taverne was deselected by his left-wing local party in Lincoln over the issue of Britain joining what was then still the ‘Common Market’ because of his fanatical pro-European views. He promptly resigned to fight a by-election as an independent on a Social Democratic platform, and won the contest against the official Labour candidate.
The Tory by-election candidate was the right-wing Jonathan Guinness, a member of the brewing dynasty, and the campaign was enlivened by his suggestion that razor blades should be left in the cells of convicted murderers for them to commit suicide, which won him the nickname ‘razor blades Guinness’.
Taverne’s triumph was short-lived. He held his seat in the general election of February 1974, which ended the premiership of Edward Heath and returned Wilson to power. But was defeated in October 1974 when Wilson called another election, losing to Labour’s Margaret Jackson, (later as Margaret Beckett to be Britain’s first female Foreign Secretary and acting Labour leader after John Smith’s death in 1994).
In 1981, Taverne joined the like-minded pro-European ‘Gang of Four’: Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rogers, who left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which briefly threatened to upend British politics and break the mould of Tory and Labour domination. He twice stood for Parliament for the SDP but failed to win.
After the SDP merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats, Taverne joined the new party who made him a life peer in 1996. As a young local newspaper reporter, I interviewed Taverne, and found him typical of his breed: aloof and somewhat superior. He clearly despised the ‘common people’ who would vote to leave his beloved European Union in 2016. But no-one could deny Taverne’s political courage in being the first to break the mould.
Something of an eccentric in his views, he was an anti-monarchist member of the Republic movement and an anti-religious humanist as well – signing a protest against Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in 2010. Taverne founded the influential think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and his whole political life was an uphill struggle against what he saw as the march of unscientific irrationalism. But his long life would witness Brexit and the defeat of the sort of politics that he epitomised. It is no wonder that he titled his memoir Against the Tide. That tide has finally swept away the brand of top down politics that he represented.
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