The Labour peer and former MP Giles Radice, Lord Radice, who has died aged 85 of cancer, was one of the most far-sighted and thoughtful politicians of his generation. In the course of five decades in parliament he dedicated his career to seeking to make the Labour party appear an attractive political proposition by relating its policy objectives to the changing aspirations of the electorate.
His case for revisionism, arguing Labour’s need to reassess its values and strategies in the light of rapid economic and social change, was made most forcefully in Labour’s Path to Power: The New Revisionism, published in 1989. It signposted the route that Tony Blair would later follow with the creation of New Labour and qualified Radice as the party’s outstanding rightwing intellectual of his age.
