Veteran left-winger Meacher is dead at 75
VETERAN Left- winger Michael Meacher, who urged Jeremy Corbyn to run as Labour leader, has died at 75.
The MP for Oldham West for 45 years, he served as a junior minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and as Tony Blair’s environment minister.
David Cameron led tributes to a ‘dedicated Parliamentarian who worked tirelessly on behalf of his constituents’ and Mr Corbyn said Britain had lost ‘a man of fundamental decency’.
His death, after a short illness, leaves Labour with a by-election in a seat where it has a 14,738 majority. Mr Meacher was a dedicated socialist and ally of Tony Benn during Labour’s internal struggles of the 1980s. Neil Kinnock once branded him ‘Tony Benn’s vicar on earth’, in an interview that was said to have led to Mr Meacher’s defeat in the 1983 deputy leadership election – to Roy Hattersley.
Mr Meacher was highly respected by environmentalists for putting global warming on the agenda and helping to negotiate the 1997 Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gases.
The Oxford-educated son of an accountant, he attracted claims of hypocrisy for complaining that Margaret Thatcher’s Britain had made people see homes as ‘status symbols’. It transpired that wealthy Mr Meacher had at least eight homes.
Mr Corbyn met Mr Meacher, a ‘valued friend’, while working as his election agent in the early 1970s. He ‘urged me to stand in the leadership election and gave huge support’, Mr Corbyn said.
Mr Meacher leaves wife Lucianne and four children from his first marriage to Baroness Meacher.