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Son of a Welsh miner who became a long-serving Labour MP and the leader of what Private Eye called the yob tendency

Allan Rogers, who has died aged 91, was an intelligent but truculent South Wales miner’s son who served on the Opposition front bench under his friend Neil Kinnock and then John Smith, but was too “Old Labour” for Tony Blair.

» Special Correspondent MAY 5th 1981 was one of the most defining days in Irish history. It was the day that Bobby Sands, the 27-year-old Member of Parliament for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, died on hunger strike in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh as part of the republican prisoners’ campaign for the restoration of political status. Bobby was the first of ten hunger strikers to give their lives in 1981 in the centuries-old struggle against Britain’s attempted criminalisation of the struggle for freedom in its first and nearest colony. He was elected on April 9th 1981 in the by-election to fill the...