My husband, Fred Twine, who has died aged 83, was an analyst and campaigner on low pay and in-work poverty, whose work building union and policy support for a national minimum wage helped lead Labour to introduce it in 1999. In a career shaped by his early experiences growing up in working-class communities, his research and campaigning were always focused on improving people’s lives.
Fred was born in Bethnal Green, east London, the eldest of three sons of Cecilia (nee Ormes) and Fred Twine, a french polisher. He left the William Morris technical school in Walthamstow at 15 to become an apprentice draftsman with British Rail, where he studied electrical engineering and joined the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association union, the Labour party young socialists and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
At the age of 23 Fred resumed his formal education, taking highers in English and history at Newbattle Abbey college in Midlothian, then social and political studies at the Co-operative college, Loughborough, before going on to read sociology at the new University of Essex in 1965. He and I met in our first term and married in 1969.
As a genuine worker who knew what he was talking about, Fred became something of a celebrity among leftwing students at Essex. In 1968, as chair of the Socialist Society, he chaired a meeting of 1,200 students and staff at which the vice-chancellor, Albert Sloman, attempted to defend the suspension of some students to a hostile audience. Fred calmly kept the temperature down.
After graduation, he split his time between his master’s in sociology and a research appointment, both at Essex, his work linking the issue of low pay to benefits, child poverty and welfare rights. He also organised a union branch for university manual staff.
In 1970 he moved to teach sociology at the University of Aberdeen, where his work drew attention to issues including social rights, housing and environmental justice. He also became a district councillor, working hard for his largely pensioner electorate.
Fred’s book Citizenship and Social Rights (1994) was ahead of its time, calling for more egalitarian policies to tackle the climate crisis. He also contributed to Scotland: The Real Divide (edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, 1983) and to the Church of Scotland’s book Just Sharing (1988).
Rheumatoid arthritis and the side-effects of medication forced him to retire from council and then academic work before we moved to Glasgow in 2002.
Fred is survived by me, our children, Joanna and Richard, and grandchildren, Caitlin and Marianne, and his brothers, Terry and Roy.
