[2] While working at the university, he was a local councillor in the Greater Manchester borough of Tameside, where he was the Chair of the Environmental Health and Education Committees.
[citation needed] On 14 June 1984 Ford was elected as a member of the European Parliament for the new constituency of Greater Manchester East.
Ford campaigned for Gibraltar to have its own seat in the European Parliament, rather than only having representation through the South West England constituency.
The Labour Party gained 118,716 votes (7.61%) in the South West region in 2009, which was insufficient to win a seat in the multi-member constituency which had had its representation reduced from seven to six at that election.
[6] Ford was for fifteen years a member of the European Parliament's Research Committee, the Guest Editor of the Science and Public Policy Special Issue on Science and Technology in Europe and the author, with Chris Niblett and Lindsay Walker, of The Future for Ocean Technology (Frances Pinter, 1987).
In 1996 he published with Glenys Kinnock and Arlene McCarthy Changing States: A Labour Agenda for Europe (Mandarin, 1996).
[11] After leaving the European Parliament, Ford founded the Public Affairs and International Relations consultancy Polint.
[12] Ford stood in the 2014 European Parliament election, but his second position on the Labour South West England list did not yield a seat.