ABSTRACT
Raymond Plant was born in 1945 and is a distinguished political theorist who has held professorships at the University of Southampton, King's College London and Sciences Po in Paris. He was Warden of St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2000. He was created a life peer in 1992 taking the title Baron Plant of Highfield, of Weelsby in the County of Humberside, and sitting on the Labour bench. He is a Lay Canon at Winchester Cathedral. In a Fabian Society tract published in 1988, entitled Citizenship, Rights and Socialism, Plant argued that: Democratic citizenship should be the key idea at the centre of this project and that it can provide a unifying framework within which policy can be elaborated and a link to Labour's historical principles can be maintained. The concept of basic needs is central to Raymond Plant's case for social and economic rights, and the topic is present in the whole of his discussion of social rights.
