LORD McCarthy, the Labour peer and Oxford expert on industrial relations, has died aged 87.

A fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1992, he was heavily involved in the struggles of both Labour and Conservative governments to regulate the trade unions.

He was an arbitrator in industrial disputes and, enjoying the trust and respect of both sides, he came to be regarded as “the prince of industrial relations peacemakers”.

Later he served as a Labour spokesman on employment in the House of Lords.

Bill McCarthy was born in 1925 and brought up in North London. He left school at 14 to work in a tailor’s shop.

After serving in the army he won a trade union scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford.

At Ruskin he met Margaret Godfrey, the daughter of an Oxford midwife, and they married in 1957.

The couple worked closely together within Oxford Labour Party, which he chaired in the 1960s and 1970s. Lady McCarthy would later serve as chairman of Oxfordshire Area Health Authority.

After Ruskin, Lord McCarthy moved on to Merton College, gaining first class honours in philosophy, politics and economics before transferring to Nuffield College, to complete a DPhil in industrial relations in 1961.

Nuffield was to become his base for the rest of his career. He was a research fellow, later a faculty fellow, and from 1992 an emeritus fellow.

His expertise on the closed shop and strikes led to his appointment as a research director on the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, set up by Harold Wilson’s Government in 1965.

He was picked by one of the leading lights of the Wilson government, Barbara Castle, to join the Department of Employment in 1968 as its senior economic adviser, and was prominent in developing the ill-fated In Place of Strife policy.

With the Tories coming to power in 1970 and Ted Heath’s government beset by strikes, he was invited by British Rail and unions to chair the Railway Staff National Tribunal.

Harold Wilson made him a life peer in 1975 andl from 1975 to 1976, he was an influential member of the Houghton Committee on Aid to Political Parties a.

From 1980 to 1997, he was a fixture on the Opposition front bench in the House of Lords, advising both Neil Kinnock and his successor as Labour leader, John Smith.

At the request of Oxford City Council, he chaired an inquiry in 1989 to 1990 into Rover’s plans to shut its Cowley factory with the loss of 5,000 jobs, before the arrival of BMW ensured the plant’s survival.

Lord McCarthy, who lived for much of his life in Old Headington, died on November 18. He is survived by his wife Margaret. They had no children.