Roger Liddle becomes Labour peer

Chair of Policy Network appointed to House of Lords

Policy Network is pleased to announce that Roger Liddle, the chair of the thinktank’s board, has been appointed to the House of Lords as a Labour peer by the outgoing prime minister Gordon Brown. The announcement was made by 10 Downing Street on Friday 28 May. Roger will formally assume the peerage after his introduction to the House of Lords later this month.

In response to his nomination, Roger said “It is a great honour to have been appointed by Gordon Brown as a working peer to the Labour benches of the House of Lords. I look forward to taking up my seat and campaigning for all the issues I feel so strongly about as a progressive – economic recovery in our post-crisis world, harnessing globalisation with social justice, securing the long-term future of the EU, delivering low-carbon transition and designing a social investment state. Policy Network is a leader in its field of outlining policy and political solutions to these pressing challenges, not least in its commitment to renewing social democracy, and I look forward to continuing my role as chair well into the future.”

Roger has been chair of Policy Network since the summer of 2009. He was until October 2007 economic adviser to the European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and for seven years from 1997 special adviser on European affairs to then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  From 2009-2010, Roger chaired the UK government’s New Industry, New Jobs, Universities and Skills advisory panel, which reported directly to Peter Mandelson, the then First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills.

Roger has written extensively on European and British affairs and appears regularly across a variety of media platforms. He is a visiting fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics, and he is the author of numerous publications, including The Blair Revolution (with Peter Mandelson, 1996), Global Europe, Social Europe (with Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond, 2006) and Beyond New Labour (with Patrick Diamond, 2009). He has also co-authored two papers for the President of the Commission’s thinktank, the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, on “Europe’s Social Reality” (February 2007) and the “Single Market: Yesterday and Tomorrow” (July 2006), alongside several other Fabian Society and Policy Network pamphlets.