Lord Hogg of Cumbernauld was a Scottish Labour MP who served as deputy Opposition chief whip in the Commons under Neil Kinnock and campaigned for the Union with England. His interests included transport, heritage and Anglo-Israeli relations.

Norman Hogg left Ruthrieston Secondary School in Aberdeen in 1953 at the age of 15 and spent the next 14 years working as a local council officer. In 1967 he joined the National Association of Local Government Officers (Nalgo) as a district officer and with this union experience as a springboard he was selected to stand as a Labour candidate in the 1979 general election. He was MP for Dumbartonshire East from 1979 until 1983 and, with changes to constituency boundaries in 1983, the member for Cumbernauld & Kilsyth until the 1997 general election.

Hogg served as a Scottish Labour whip in the House of Commons from 1982 to 1983 and as deputy chief whip for the Opposition from 1983 to 1987. In a 1985 poll of MPs taken to decide who was to be Labour’s chief whip Hogg lost out by one vote to Derek Foster.

It was a childhood experience, he related, that incubated a lasting affinity with Israel. The Aberdeen tenement block that he lived in as a boy was damaged in a German bombing raid and the young Hogg was taken in by one of the few Jewish families in the city.

His devotion to Israel brought him to prominence in 1991 when Hogg called for the resignation of David Gore-Booth, an assistant undersecretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Gore-Booth had told a cross-party House of Commons group in March that year that “Israel is little or no better than any other Middle Eastern state in terms of militarism, standard of democracy and denial of human rights”.

Gore-Booth, an acknowledged specialist on the Middle East, said his comments were made in a personal capacity. Hogg, however, said: “He is not entitled to a personal capacity while holding a post of such great sensitivity in relation to a part of the world that is a powder keg.”

Having joined the House of Commons in an election remembered as a Conservative triumph, Hogg left it as Tony Blair and new Labour swept to power with a landslide majority in 1997. His departure, however, was not forced by any freak electoral swing against Labour in his constituency east of Glasgow: Hogg did not stand for re-election.

His departure allowed the Labour Party to increase the number of women MPs it sent to Westminster. Rosemary McKenna, drawn from an all-women shortlist of four, was selected in his place and held the seat.Three months after Blair moved into Downing Street, Hogg was elevated to the House of Lords.

He was one of 57 men and women — 31 from the Labour Party — to be simultaneously honoured in a move that gave the new administration the leverage it needed within the Upper House to push through constitutional changes, though he always denied any suggestion that he had agreed to stand down from the Commons in exchange for a life peerage.

Hogg was Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 2002 until 2004 and latterly sat as Lord High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland — an appointment which meant that he was the Queen’s representative in church meetings north of the Border. Although the post was largely ceremonial, the appointment did underline his firmly held Christian beliefs.

Hogg is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1964.

Lord Hogg of Cumbernauld, Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, 2002-04, was born on March 12, 1938. He died of cancer on October 8, 2008, aged 70