AN OXFORD don who was an economic adviser to Harold Wilson has died aged 82.

Derek Robinson was a senior researcher at the Oxford Institute of Economics and Statistics in the early 1960s when he became a senior economic adviser to the Prices and Incomes Board and then to the Department of Employment and Productivity under Labour MP Barbara Castle.

He had won admirers in government with his proposals to link wages to the cost of living, but they made little progress and were eventually abandoned.

It was during this period that the Labour government put forward the white paper called In Place of Strife which was drafted by Wilson and Castle and would have led to a reduction in the power of the trade unions.

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But the plans were opposed by the unions and never made it into law.

After Edward Heath won the 1970 General Election the miners went on strike and oil production was cut by a number of Arab states, leading to the ‘three-day week’, which left people without work two days a week and a cut back in electricity usage.

It was in this period that an organisation called the Pay Board was set up to conduct an inquiry into wage anomalies and Mr Robinson was appointed as its deputy chairman.

His work on the Pay Board was to be controverial as the figures appeared to prove that miners were paid eight per cent less than other manual workers.

It was this that led to Heath accusing Mr Robinson, a known Labour supporter, of having lost him the 1974 General Election.

The Pay Board was abolished by the new Wilson government and Mr Robinson returned to Oxford, where he committed himself to more local matters.

He became chairman of the Oxfordshire and South Bucks District Manpower Committee in 1975 and in 1978 led a committee to tackle unemployment in the county which resulted in the establishment of an Oxford Skills Bank, a register of skilled workers who could be called upon when jobs become available.

In the 1980s he worked as adviser to the International Labour Organisation and worked on the labour market policies of a range of overseas governments.

It was through this work that he met the former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Derek Robinson was born in Barnsley on February 9, 1932.

He was the son of a coalminer who attended Barnsley Holgate Grammar School before joining the civil service and then winning a TUC scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford.

It was at Ruskin that he met Jane Lynch whom he married in 1956.

He went on to take a master’s degree in economics at Lincoln College and helped set up the Oxford Institute for Economics and Statistics in 1961.

In 1969 he moved to Magdalen College where he remained a tutorial fellow for 30 years when he became an emeritus fellow.

While at Magdalen he was committed to making sure the college took students from Ruskin, but was eager to make sure they had worked as hard as he had.

Despite his political background he claimed that William Hague, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary, was one of his brightest students.

Derek Robinson died on September 1, 2014. He is survived by his wife Jane, son Toby and daughter Lucy.

His funeral took place at Oxford Crematorium on Monday, September 15.

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