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Dick Taverne, Lord Taverne (born 18 October 1928) is an English politician, who is one of the small number of members of the British House of Commons elected since the Second World War who was not the candidate of a major political party.

Educated at Charterhouse School, and then Balliol College, Oxford he graduated in Philosophy and Ancient History, qualified as a barrister in 1954 and became a Queen's Counsel (QC)in 1965.

In 1962 he was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Lincoln, serving in government under Harold Wilson as a Home Office Minister and then Financial Secretary to the Treasury. In 1972 he was asked to stand down by the Lincoln Constituency Labour Party, who disagreed with his pro-European Economic Community views. He resigned from the Labour Party and Parliament and was re-elected as an Independent Democratic Labour candidate at a by-election in March 1973.

Taverne lost his seat in parliament at the October 1974 general election, but he continued to remain active with the Democratic Labour Association until it folded after the 1979 general election.

He was a leading social democratic thinker, publishing The Future of the Left: Lincoln and After in 1974.

In 1979, he launched the Institute for Fiscal Studies, now an influential independent think tank and was the first Director, later Chairman.

When the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was formed in the early 1980s, he joined them, serving on their national committee from 1981 until 1987.

He was also twice a parliamentary candidate for the SDP. When the SDP merged with the Liberal Party he joined the new Liberal Democrats, serving on its Federal Policy Committee from 1989 until 1990.

In 1996 he was created a life peer and sits in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat.

Married to a scientist, he became interested in science and public policy, and in 2002 founded Sense About Science, a charity with the objective of advancing public understanding of science and the evidence-based approach to scientific issues.

He was elected President of the Research Defence Society in 2004. He was a member of the House of Lords Committee on the Use of Animals in Scientific Procedures and is currently a member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.

He is the author of The March of Unreason, published by Oxford University Press in March 2005.

He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. He won the Science Writers' Award as Parliamentary Science Communicator of the Year 2005.

[edit] Books

• The Future of the Left: Lincoln and After (1974), ISBN 0-224-00950-8
• The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism (2005), ISBN 0-19-280485-5

[edit] See also

• List of British MPs not elected from a major party

[edit] External links

• Lord Taverne profile at the site of Liberal Democrats
• Profile on gmwatch.org

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by: Geoffrey de Freitas	Member of Parliament for Lincoln 1962–1974	Succeeded by: Margaret Jackson
Political offices
Preceded by: Harold Lever	Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1969–1970	Succeeded by: Patrick Jenkin