LETTER : Freethought

Nicolas Walter
Saturday 20 April 1996 23:02 BST
Comments

Your report of humanists in politics ("God may be dead ...", 14 April) is marred by a minor error and a major omission.

Charles Bradlaugh is said to have "lived with the feminist Annie Besant". She wasn't a feminist, and he didn't live with her, in any sense; they would have married if they had been free, but they were both married to others.

The great difference between the attitudes to religious unbelief in the main political parties is that the right does not have and the left does have a long association with freethought. There have been occasional isolated freethinkers on the right, but on the left there has been a continuous succession from Thomas Paine and Robert Owen through G J Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, William Morris and Robert Blatchford, Ramsay MacDonald and Harry Snell, Harold Laski and G D H Cole, Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell, to Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.

Nicolas Walter

London N1

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