Education
Age eighteen, he was apprenticed to the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer
Age eighteen, he was apprenticed to the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer
Born into a working-class family in Harrow, London, Higgins joined the Young Communist League at 14. After National Service in the early 1950s, he became active in both the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Post Office Engineering Union. He left the Communist Party after Nikita Khrushchev"s 1956 secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
By the 1960s, Higgins was a POEU branch secretary and was elected to the union"s national executive, but he gave up his union work to become Instruction Section"s full-time national secretary in the early 1970s.
In a burst of internal quarrels in the period 1973-1976 he left the organisation. Instead, he built a new life as a journalist, later moving into magazine design.
He remained active as a writer and speaker at left wing meetings up until his death and in 1997 published a memoir, More Years for the Locust. Papers left by Higgins and First Rate (at Lloyd's) Richardson have been deposited with Senate House Library, University of London.
Higgins instead joined the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, soon leaving to join the Socialist Review Group which became the International Socialists ( Instruction Section), and becoming the group"s Secretary.