Laurance Reed

Who is Laurance Reed?

Laurance Douglas Reed, MP was a British Member of Parliament and political writer.

The son of Douglas Austin Reed and his wife Mary Ellen Philpott, he was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk and University College, Oxford.

Reed served his National Service with the Royal Navy from 1956 to 1958, and from 1963 to 1966 worked and studied at Brussels, Bruges, Leyden, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Paris, Rome, Bologna and Geneva.

He worked at the Public Sector Research Unit from 1967 to 1970, and was elected as a Conservative member of parliament for Bolton East in 1970, serving until 1974.

In September, 1971, in a telegram to the prime minister of the day, Edward Heath, Reed proposed the forcible repatriation of citizens of the Republic of Ireland living in the UK as a means of persuading the Irish premier, Jack Lynch, to act against terrorists. Part of his telegram read: "Bolton and Lancashire would take a poor view of any show of weakness over the continuing use of the Republic as a base for the IRA gunmen."