Alumni news
Obituary: Lord Lyndon Harrison
Posted on behalf of: University of Sussex
Last updated: Tuesday, 5 November 2024
Lord Harrison (Credit: © House of Lords / Roger Harris)
Lord Lyndon Harrison, a University of Sussex alumni and Labour Party life peer in the House of Lords, has died at the age of 77.
Born in Oxford in 1947, Lyndon Harrison studied at the City of Oxford High School for Boys, before going on to study English and American Studies at the University of Warwick. He worked as a research officer for the UMIST Union in Manchester from 1975-78 and a Union manager for the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education in Clwyd from 1978-89.
He completed a postgraduate degree in American Studies at the University of Sussex - graduating in 1971 - and a further one at the University of Keele. He became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 1989 and in 1999 he was made a Labour life peer – acting as a voice of support for the University of Sussex in the House of Lords and regularly attending our events.
He became an active member of the upper house, participating in debates around freedom of religion and belief, humanism, health funding, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights until his retirement in 2022. As a diabetes sufferer, he also spoke on occasion about the impact of the disease.
Lord Harrison is survived by his wife, Hilary Anne Plank, and children, Adam Harrison and Sara Harrison.