Britain’s then best-selling newspaper the Daily Mirror reported Lawler’s campaigning activities, starting with a big splash on his Homeless Bureau in 1956.

[10] There was a 1967 report about an all-night vigil by women in temporary accommodation who were separated from their husbands - this was two weeks after the showing of the TV play Cathy Come Home[11] - and a 1968 splash about eight houses compulsorily purchased without any compensation.

[15] Lawler first stood for Parliament as Liberal candidate in Dudley in the Black Country at the 1955 general election coming third with under 10% share of the vote and losing his deposit.

[16] He fought Birmingham, Perry Barr at the 1959 general election, again coming third, but this time gaining 14% of the poll and avoided losing his deposit.

Against the backdrop of massive redevelopment in Birmingham city centre, the electorate of Ladywood had shrunk, the constituency suffered from significant deprivation and its population would today be classified as socially excluded.

When the election was held on 26 June, he won the seat with a majority of 2,713 votes over his Labour rival Doris Fisher, with the Conservative, Dr Louis Glass, in third place.

[3] Patrick Brogan in The Times reported during the 1970 general election campaign that "Wallace Lawler is living proof that personality matters in politics.

[25] During the campaign, 'A huge set of placards was displayed along one floor of a block of council flats reading “Back Lawler’s rents and rates – down fight”.

[28] Six months after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Lawler chaired a meeting in Birmingham addressed by the Information Attaché at South Africa House, London, which was reported under the headline "Apartheid aims at civilising peoples".

[29] In 1961 Lawler spoke alongside other local political figures at a solidarity meeting in Birmingham, timed to coincide with three days of non co-operation protest by black people in South Africa.

Lawler called for government financial compensation to householders for the depreciation in house prices in "hardship cases such as elderly people who suddenly found that immigrants were living next door".

This replicated the most notorious theme of the campaign in the neighbouring constituency Smethwick in the 1964 general election[33] On the eve of poll, the Birmingham Post carried a lengthy article on Handsworth, in which the Liberals advocated deportation for immigrant criminals "without the option of fine or imprisonment".

Lawler called for "a tightening-up of the employment voucher system so that immigrants were prevented from drawing national assistance soon after arriving".

[38] Eleven days after Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, Lawler said in a Liberal party political broadcast on national television, "We have got to halt immigration into Birmingham, the Black Country and other heavily concentrated areas."

[40] Despite this stance, Lawler's reputation inside the Liberal Party locally and nationally was somewhat tarnished by his views on Commonwealth immigration.

[41] Councillor Paul Tilsley was one leading Liberal in Birmingham to express doubts about the choice of Lawler for the Ladywood by-election, given his controversial remarks about immigration in 1968.

"[44] Stuart Mole commented that "The techniques of community politics had first been fashioned in the Newtown area of Birmingham by Wallace Lawler".

[45] As one political scientist has commented, "In fact community organisation in Britain was not pioneered by new social movements but by the Liberal Party in Birmingham.