by Charles | Sep 8, 2020 | Uncategorized
I was the first person in my family to go to university.
I have had an interesting but not particularly lucrative professional life. I have done well for literally thousands of people.
As an immigration lawyer, I had many clients introduced to me by prominent people in immigrant communities. Two such “introducers”, brothers, happened to meet in my waiting room whilst the people they brought were being seen by my staff or by myself. They started making a list of cases that they had brought me where I had been involved in preventing deportations or removals of “good” people. This came to 33 cases. In only one had I not been able to prevent the deportation or removal.
I was involved in the ground breaking case of Hardial Singh (Hardial Singh [1984] 1 WLR 704,) where I was the first person to suggest habeus corpus as a remedy. Hardial Singh is still good law today, being approved by the UK Supreme Court in 2011. It has been approved in Hong Kong and in other jurisdictions.
In politics I have worked for the Labour Party since the 1966 General Election. I led my first demonstration at 17.
I joined the Labour Party at 20, and was a Constituency Labour Party Chair at 24. In 1986 I increased the Labour vote 80% to win the third safest Tory seat on Bradford Council for Labour. In 1990 I increased my 1986 vote 47% to record the largest ever vote for any candidate in Heaton ward. In 1991 we had a second Labour councillor elected in Heaton.
In 1987 I met a good woman and I took on an instant family. We now live in comfortable retirement on a small farm in Portugal.
With being Secretary of Labour International Constituency Labour Party – more than 3,000 Labour Party members living abroad on 6 continents – and the necessary farm work – I struggle to make the time to write.