He was in training to fly Mosquito fighter bombers in the night intruder role as the war in Europe came to an end, he was then posted by the R.A.F as a radio technician to India during the twilight of British rule there.
Parsons then worked as a research officer for the National Coal Board until 1959, before his first academic appointment at the Brunel College of Technology in London.
His thesis was that overpopulation can be seen as a threat to personal liberty and that the governments of developed countries deliberately encouraged unsustainable population growth as a form of political control.
In his last major published work, The Treason of the BBC (2006), Parsons accused the British Broadcasting Corporation of suppressing the debate around overpopulation.
In 1959 Parsons read about the political controversy that had emerged following the announcement by the National Coal Board (NCB) that Blackhill Colliery, near the village of Scremerston in Northumberland, was to close with the loss of 160 jobs.
Parsons wrote an article condemning the centralised decision making that had driven the process, arguing that the local community and businesses dependent on the mine should have been involved.
[1] On the advice and encouragement of his friend, the Free Cinema filmmaker Karel Reisz, Parsons then decided to make a documentary about the campaign, despite being an amateur with no formal training in or prior knowledge of film production.