Reginald Sorensen, Baron Sorensen

Reginald William Sorensen, Baron Sorensen (19 June 1891 – 8 October 1971) was a Unitarian minister and Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for over 30 years, from 1929 to 1931 and again from 1935 to 1964, when he was raised to the peerage.

Early life Sorensen was born in Islington, north London, on 19 June 1891. He was his parents' first born child and had two brothers and two sisters. Sorensen's father, William James Sorensen (1868–1925), was a silversmith of Danish paternity. Sorensen's mother, Alice Jemima (died 1934), was the daughter of a fisherman from Worthing, Sussex.

After leaving school at the age of fourteen, Sorensen worked as an errand-boy, in a factory as a manual worker, and later in a shop.

Political career During the First World War, Sorensen was exempt from military service due to being a religious minister, but declared himself a pacifist. Sorensen served as chair of the Fabian Colonial Bureau and the India League, which supported Indian nationalism. In 1946 Sorensen formed part of a parliamentary deputation to India and he welcomed Indian independence the following year.

A noted secularist, he became an Appointed Lecturer at the South Place Ethical Society in the 1960s.

At the 1964 general election, he was re-elected for a seventh term in the House of Commons. Shortly afterwards, on 15 December 1964, he was created a life peer, as Baron Sorensen, of Leyton in the County of Essex. In 1966 Sorensen proposed the abolition of the House of Lords in favour of a senate of experts in administration. He then served until 1968 as a Lord-in-waiting in the House of Lords. Speaking in 1971, Sorensen suggested that the Government should 'positively encourage sterilisation, here and elsewhere, of those who are physically or mentally unfit' in order to stabilise the world's population.

He had been offered the peerage to make a vacancy for the Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, who had been defeated in his Smethwick constituency. However, the by-election in January 1965 was won by the Conservative Ronald Buxton.

Personal life On 22 January 1916 Sorensen married Muriel (b. 1891). Sorensen's father-in-law was the Revd William Harvey-Smith, a Unitarian minister from Lincolnshire - she was sister to Lilla, a fellow pacifist. Sorensen and his wife had a daughter and two sons.

Sorensen died on 8 October 1971 at Whipps Cross Hospital, Leytonstone. He was cremated several days later at the City of London cemetery.