Born into a working-class family in Harrow, London, Higgins joined the Young Communist League at 14.
[1] After National Service in the early 1950s, he became active in both the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Post Office Engineering Union (POEU).
He left the Communist Party after Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
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.
[1] Papers left by Higgins and Al Richardson have been deposited with Senate House Library, University of London.