Lord Greaves
Lib Dem policy architect
LORD GREAVES, who has died at 78, was a radical, independentminded Yorkshireman who pioneered – from his base at Colne in Lancashire – the Liberal Party’s “community politics” which revived its fortunes in much of the country during the 1970s.
A councillor in Colne for 42 years out of 50 until his death, Tony Greaves was a thorn in the side of party leaders from David Steel to Nick Clegg; it was Charles Kennedy who secured him a life peerage. He was a leading dissident as Steel formed the Liberals’ alliance with the SDP, and broke with Steel’s drive for a merger after the 1987 election – though he soon became a Liberal Democrat himself.
He was also among the severest critics of Paddy Ashdown’s efforts to develop close ties with New Labour. Ashdown described one party policy session in 1998 with Greaves at full throttle as “probably the worst meeting I have ever attended”.
Greaves was convinced, from the outset, that Clegg’s coalition with David Cameron was a “bad idea”, saying no-one had given time to thinking through the implications.
He stood for Parliament three times, but his strength was as a counterweight to Westminster. As secretary up to 1985 of the Association of Liberal Councillors, and subsequently the guru of local political activism, he was consistently suspicious of policies and deals hatched in London.
In Colne, he was respected across the party divide for his commitment to the town, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Pendle district. One fellow councillor described him as “a force of political nature”.
Anthony Robert Greaves was born in Bradford on July
27, 1942, the son of Geoffrey Greaves and the former Moyra Brookes. From Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, he read Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, then taught at Colne Grammar.
He made his mark at the 1970 Liberal Assembly, introducing the motion that committed the party to “community politics” – campaigning on the doorstep to secure initially small improvements that mattered to local people. Editing the party magazine New Outlook, he backed Steel for the leadership against John Pardoe. But he made Steel’s life uncomfortable as secretary of the Association of Liberal Councillors, then as a member of the party’s policy machinery who had started his own publishing house (he was later a secondhand book dealer). When Steel moved to merge with the SDP, Greaves was initially one of the Liberals’ negotiators, but pulled out of the team just before it concluded what became known as the “dead parrot” policy document on the merger negotiations.
From 2000 he brought to the Lords a whiff of social activism, and to the parliamentary party a resistance to reforms by Menzies Campbell and, subsequently, Clegg.
In 2013 he aroused controversy by making light of accusations by four Liberal Democrat women of sexual harassment from his fellow Lib Dem Lord Rennard, writing: “We don’t know the details, but it is hardly an offence for one adult person to make fairly mild sexual advances to another. What matters is whether they are rebuffed. If the allegations as made are a matter for resignation, around a half of the male members of the Lords over 50 would probably not be seen again.”
He was vice-president of the Local Government Association, and the Open Spaces Society. In 1988 he published, with Rachael Pitchford, Merger: the inside story.
In 1968 he married Heather Baxter, who survives him with their two daughters.