Robin Corbett, Labour MP for Hemel Hempstead, then Birmingham Erdington and a working Peer died this week (19th Feb) at 78 from lung cancer. He had always been a man of the people. When he was two, his family was deported from Australia because of his father’s political beliefs. This inspired a fire and determination to fight injustice and fundamentalism whatever the climate. But he never forgot his roots.

Robin Corbett was born in Fremantle, Australia in 1933. Along with his older brother, and twin sister, the family were deported to England when Australian capitalism copied the American model of using private armies to break-up the alternative model to social-democratic trade unions of seeking workers solidarity, direct action and workers self-management to be rightful owners of a nation’s wealth. Robin would describe his bewilderment as he saw all the household goods being thrown onto the street and wondering why his dad, an organiser of the Industrial Workers of the World known as the WOBBLIES, an anarcho-syndicalist federation of various labour movements, having to be deported and the family treated like criminals.

Labour leader Ed Miliband talked of him as a champion of causes close to his heart, whether it was prison reform, animal welfare, safeguarding civil liberties and ensuring that the anonymity of rape victims found its way onto the statute book. What Ed Miliband may not have known is the spark and spur that enabled Robin Corbett to become an outstanding example of what a constituency MP should be; a social networker for all the people. He brought this to an art-form when he became elected as the Labour MP for Hemel Hempstead in October 1974 and then MP for Birmingham Erdington from 1983 to 2001.

A former journalist (deputy editor of Farmer’s Weekly, then head of training at IPC Magazines) he was far more than a wordsmith, as he liked to call himself. Tall, jutting jaw and able to speak everybody’s language whilst fighting tooth and nail against a Labour Minister of Health for a hospital that would measure the modernity of the vibrant New Town, he also established a network of experts, culled from all classes and professions of the community no matter as to their political party affiliation. My expertise was in buildings and their services. He would call me up or drop a note. “Billy, Mrs Smith came to see me. Her house is full of condensation and mould growth. Here’s her address. I said you would know the right answers. Can you action it quick-time. Thanks. Robin”. And so I would. The list of experts seemed endless. Whether the question was about drains or a medical complaint or to do with schooling, bullying, or another social problem, Robin would ask a specialist to enquire, let him have a report and then he would add his clout. This is what he believed a Member of Parliament was all about, a representative for the people who was able to help get things done on their behalf.

This did not go down well with the Trotskyist hard left within the Labour Party with their centralist ideas and in 1979 although Robin had the support of the majority of local Labour Party members they ensured he was de-selected by back-room take-over. In the 1983 election Hemel Hempstead-born Paul Boetang stood in his place, only to lose his deposit. Meanwhile busloads of Hemel Hempstead party members travelled to the West Midlands to help ensure their man was returned to the House of Commons which he did – with a majority of 261! (When he left, that had increased to 12,000).

Until Robin became MP in Erdington, he joined my avant-garde and early-bird professional practice of environmental and energy engineers in St. Albans. Here he became engaged in educating prime-movers and public in the emerging problems of climate change and the need for new industries and job creation for a whole new technological revolution. He was able to see at first-hand how innovative thinking with heat-pumps, ground energy, wave, solar and wind systems had to be linked to a new way of thinking and educational changes. It was a sharp learning process that he never forgot. He would be amazed at the lack of knowledge of Conservative Energy Ministers. When Margaret Thatcher’s government stopped the funding of a new university to be built in Sheffield dedicated to creating a new generation of renewable energy sciences, Robin, always an energetic MP wrote to me of his disgust, knowing I was to be one of the designers for this new university that would have given us an essential cutting edge for today.

From the time he won his Birmingham seat in 1983 until six months ago, Robin would seek to draw attention to my call for solar energy collecting roads and other ideas to government ministers. He would go further and help to arrange for other innovators to meet in parliament and encourage business and commerce to see what we are missing as a society. He was forever networking and achieved much through his warmth, sense of fun, and sense of humour.

He was a popular Chair of the Labour Peers Group and had many active interests including the long-serving Chairman of Friends of Cyprus and Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom for which he started working since 1981 to bring freedom, human rights and democracy to that country. As Chairman of the all-party Penal Reform Group he was particularly interested in education for prisoners and his family are to establish an annual award in his name to achieve this aim.

One of my unanswered questions for Robin, whom I have been close to in spirit and endeavour over the past 40 years, was to ask him if he thought that the modern non-violent protest movement’s of ‘’Occupy the Street’’ and Stéphane Hessel’s, “Time for Outrage” polemic with the banner words, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE, would have, along with the growing protests of the working people of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain with the ideals that his father imbued in him as a young man. I am certain that amongst our years of correspondence I shall find his answer. Deep down I know what it will be.

We were close as only friends can be. We knew each other’s families along with our strengths and our failures. We sang together. We canvassed for each other. We were comrades for a better world. Among his many letters I have on file are the words; “Certainly out in the real world people are more interested in solutions and what works rather than in dogma.” His revolutionary dad would have been proud.

Profile: Bill Holdsworth is an environmental and architectural engineer. An innovator of technological design for energy-conscious and climatic-adaptive technologies, he is an author, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer. His ideas have been classed as ‘ahead of their time’. He joined the Labour Party in 1945 but became increasingly involved with the Green movements from the late 1980’s. He now lives in the Netherlands having become one of Thatcher’s ‘walking wounded’ after the economic collapse of the late 1980’s. He is still active writing and advising at the age of 83.