Michael Barnes
Labour MP who fought airport noise and supported Bangladesh
MICHAEL BARNES, who has died aged 85, was a leading light in the youthful Labour intake to the Commons at the 1966 election when Harold Wilson secured an overall majority of 98.
In his eight years representing Brentford & Chiswick until boundary changes forced him out, Barnes pursued issues such as noise from Heathrow and congestion on the A4, and championed the creation of the state of Bangladesh.
One of the founders of the SDP, he returned to Labour after two years. He ended his career as Legal Services Ombudsman for England and Wales, a post he filled effectively despite having no legal training.
Michael Cecil John Barnes was born on September 22 1932, the son of Major CHR Barnes and Katherine (née) Kennedy, and educated at Malvern College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He spent his National Service with the Wiltshire Regiment in Hong Kong.
Before entering the Commons, he taught at Holland Park comprehensive; Caroline Benn, wife of Tony, was a governor and parent.
Barnes joined Labour in 1957 and fought Wycombe in 1964. Selected for Brentford & Chiswick two years later, he ousted its Conservative MP Dudley Smith by 607 votes.
The size and quality of the new Labour intake meant intense competition for jobs. Barnes shone on the Public Accounts Committee, but even a personal recommendation from Roy Jenkins did not lead Wilson to bring him into the government. Instead, he chaired Labour’s backbench social security group.
When Nigeria’s southeastern province seceded as Biafra in 1967, Barnes urged the government to stop supplying arms to the federal forces. But his call for a “fair, just and honourable” policy was ignored.
When Edward Heath pulled off his shock election victory in 1970, Barnes hung on by 513 votes. Wilson now appointed him opposition spokesman on food and prices. A year later Barnes, secretary of the Labour Committee for Europe, backed Heath’s application to join the EEC and left the front bench.
After a cyclone devastated what was then East Pakistan, Barnes, as a council member of War on Want and with a strong Bengali community in his constituency, visited the region. He arrived as Pakistan embarked on a campaign of repression that forced millions to seek refuge across the Indian border in West Bengal.
On his return, he highlighted the abuses in the Commons, calling for Pakistan’s cricket tour of England to be cancelled and paving the way for acceptance of an Indian military intervention.
Barnes went back the next year to what was now Bangladesh, meeting President Mujib. He made a third visit in 1973.
When Heath called the February 1974 election, Barnes’s constituency had been redrawn as Brentford & Isleworth. The Conservative Barney Hayhoe defeated him by 726 votes and he did not stand again that October.
Barnes left Labour after the 1979 election, and as the party moved to the Left he was involved in covert moves to set up a new organisation, which in 1981 was launched as the SDP. But he was quickly disenchanted and soon rejoined Labour, remaining a member until 2001.
He chaired the Electricity Consumers’ Council from 1977 to 1983, then from 1984 to 1990 was director of the UK Immigrants’ Advisory Service. From 1991 to 1997 he was Legal Services Ombudsman, investigating some 750 complaints about solicitors and barristers each year.
Barnes was particularly concerned at solicitors’ vagueness about their charges, and their treatment of beneficiaries from wills.
Michael Barnes, who was appointed CBE in 1998, married Anne Mason in 1962; they had a son and a daughter.
Michael Barnes, born September 22 1932, died March 22 2018