Nigel Spearing, dedicated Labour Eurosceptic – obituary

Nigel Spearing, who has died aged 86, was for 27 years as a London MP one of Labour’s most dedicated parliamentary Eurosceptics, opposing closer ties with what began as the Common Market and morphed into the EU.

He voted against Britain joining, saw an elected European Parliament as “a threat to UK self-government”, and warned that monetary union would lead to “government by bankers”.

Convinced the EEC was “not at heart a democratic community, but an economy fit for transnational companies to work in”, Spearing chaired the British Anti Common Market Campaign in the early days of UK membership, and more recently was a vice-president of the Campaign for an Independent Britain.

Despite his views on Europe, he proved a scrupulously fair chairman of the European Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but was convinced such measures deserved to be debated by the entire House.

Spearing campaigned to protect the interests of workers at Tate & Lyle’s Silvertown refinery, when EEC membership supplanted the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. He was also lauded by Christopher Booker as the only person who had managed to disentangle the EEC’s harmonisation rules on VAT.

His closest allies were Peter Shore – whom he proposed for the Labour leadership in 1983 – and Douglas Jay. His campaigning earned him the grudging respect of Margaret Thatcher, even when in 1989 he asked “how she has been so misled by the Single European Act as to support it”.

Lean and austere with a reputation for nitpicking, and a keen cyclist, Spearing did not have a parliamentary power base. A run for the Shadow Cabinet in 1983 brought him just eight votes, and backbench Tories did not warm to him despite his assiduity in committee.

At heart Spearing was a moral conservative, opposing longer pub opening hours and siding with Enoch Powell on the protection of the unborn. He denounced the introduction of market forces into the National Health Service as “contrary to Christian principles”. The one Bill he successfully promoted, in 1981, reformed the rules for notifying industrial diseases.

A preacher in the United Reformed Church, in 1972 Spearing tabled an amendment to the Bill allowing England’s Presbyterian and Congregational churches to merge to form the URC, enabling individual churches to opt out. He was supported by Tony Benn and his mother, Lady Stansgate, a Congregationalist who opposed the merger.

An oarsman in his youth and later a rowing coach, Spearing took a keen interest in the Thames, even before becoming MP for Newham South, which included the Royal group of docks. From 1975 to 2008 he was a vice-president of the River Thames Society and since 1998 he had been joint president of the London Dockland Forum.

He championed the Royal group as they declined, in 1980 urged financial support for the Port of London Authority to keep them open, and two years later condemned their closure to shipping as “an act of civic sabotage”.

From the outset Spearing condemned the Conservative government’s London Docklands Development Corporation as undemocratic, high-handed and “technically bankrupt”.

He also campaigned for the General Medical Council to take a direct interest in doctors’ medical competence, instead of concentrating on striking off those with a drink problem or who had had sexual relations with their patients.

Nigel John Spearing was born at Hammersmith on October 8 1930, the son of Austen Spearing, twice a Liberal parliamentary candidate, and his wife May. As a prefect at Latymer Upper School he gave orders to Peter Walker, the future Conservative environment secretary. After National Service in the Royal Signals, he went up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 1953 to read Geography.

On graduation he joined the staff of Wandsworth school, becoming its head of geography in 1967. A year later he became director of the Institute of Community Studies’ Thameside Research and Development Group, writing The Thames Barrier-Barrage Controversy (1969); his own preference was for a “half-tide” control, smaller and – he considered – more efficacious than a barrier. From then until his election to Parliament, he was a housemaster at Elliott School, Putney.

Spearing joined the Labour Party in 1953, fought several council elections – losing one to a Liberal who became the party’s only councillor in inner London – and from 1961 to 1963 chaired the Barons Court constituency party. He contested the safe Conservative seat of Warwick & Leamington in 1964, and two years later was co-opted on to the Greater London Council’s planning and transport committees, serving until 1973.

For the 1970 election he was selected to fight Acton, which Kenneth Baker had captured at a by-election after the suicide of the sitting Labour member. Despite Harold Wilson unexpectedly losing the election to Edward Heath, Spearing ousted Baker by 600 votes.

When Wilson reversed Labour’s previous policy and rallied the party against Heath’s taking Britain into Europe, Spearing backed him enthusiastically.

He championed a “rail ring” around inner London instead of the motorway box then planned; he lived to see London Overground instigate such a service. In 1978 he secured a Government review of electrifying all British Rail’s main lines – a project still not completed. He also highlighted a spares crisis suffered by London Buses because Barbara Castle’s Transport Act had stopped the organisation making its own components.

Redrawn boundaries for the snap February 1974 election made Acton a far tougher prospect for Labour, and Spearing lost to the future transport secretary Sir George Young by 1,451 votes.

He was only out of the Commons a matter of weeks, for Wilson made Sir Elwyn Jones, MP for Newham South, Lord Chancellor; Spearing was chosen to replace him, winning a by-election that May by 7,459 votes. He doubled his majority that October, but in 1987 and 1992 a backlash against “loony Labour” in the capital cut it to less than 3,000.

Spearing represented Newham South for 23 years, doing conscientious work on a series of select committees – procedure, overseas development, sound broadcasting, foreign affairs – but finding his niche on European Legislation, chairing the panel from 1983 to 1992. From 1989 to 1997 he chaired Labour’s parliamentary affairs committee.

In 1983 he was one of an all-party group who visited Grenada after US forces ejected the island’s Marxist regime. On his return he gave the parliamentary party a “full and horrifying report” of the massacre the junta had carried out on seizing power.

Two years later, he skipped a parliamentary visit to the Bolshoi to cover the whole of Moscow’s metro for the equivalent of 5p. After the King’s Cross fire, he reminded ministers he had been raising concerns about the safety of the London Underground for months.

Spearing left the Commons in 1997 when the Newham South constituency was abolished under further boundary changes.

He was president of the Socialist Environment and Resources Association from 1977 to 1986, and a board member of Christian Aid from 1987 to 1991.

Nigel Spearing married Wendy Newman in 1956; she survives him with their son and two daughters.

Nigel Spearing, born October 8 1930, died January 8 2017