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.
[1] During the First World War, Sorensen was exempt from military service on the grounds of being religious minister, but declared himself a pacifist.
When Labour split at the 1931 general election, Sir Wilfrid Sugden retook the seat for the Conservatives with a majority of nearly 10,000.
At the Labour Party Congress in Hastings in 1933, Sorensen emerged as a major critic of the harsh means by which the British rulers were striving to maintain their empire in India.
'[2] 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.
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.
[6] He had been offered the peerage to make a vacancy for the Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker,[7] who had been defeated in his Smethwick constituency.