Pieter Keuneman

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Peter Keuneman was a prominent Marxist member of Parliament and a leading figure in the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). He had studied at Royal College and the University of Cambridge where be became a communist, President of the Cambridge Union and editor of the student magazine Granta. He was the son of a Dutch Burgher Supreme Court Justice in Sri Lanka. At Cambridge he met his wife, Hedi Stadlen who became one of the leading European Radicals in Sri Lanka.

In the LSSP, he became associated with a tendency that supported the views of Joseph Stalin and eventually became the Communist Party of Ceylon.

During the 1970s, he became minister of housing and local government. He introduced a controversial floor area limit of 90 square metres on all new private houses.