As a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, Holland represented the Vauxhall constituency in Lambeth, London, from 1979 to 1989, when he resigned his seat to take up a post at the European University Institute in Florence.
Holland is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a Senior Scholar of the Institute of Social and European Studies, Köszeg, Hungary.
As shadow minister for development co-operation from 1983 to 1987, he drafted the 1985 Global Challenge report for the Socialist International and led the first Labour Party delegation to China since Clement Attlee in 1952.
[6] Holland's more recent case that the G20 should constitute the governing body of a World Development Organization also has attracted high-level interest from the Permanent Representatives to the UN of China, Japan, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico.
His earlier advice to Andreas Papandreou, backed by François Mitterrand, prompted the first revision of the Treaty of Rome with commitments to an internal market and to economic and social cohesion in the 1986 Single European Act.