From Attlee to Adam Smith

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Chief executive of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson writes for ePolitix.com about the role humanists have played in British politics.

Every June the British Humanist Association (BHA) celebrates Humanist Week, raising awareness of humanism and humanists to mark World Humanist Day on June 21. This year, the theme of the week is humanist heritage. In this feature, BHA chief executive Andrew Copson writes about the part that humanists have played in British politics.

Today, the all-party parliamentary humanist group has over 100 members in the House of Commons and House of Lords. But humanists – men and women who have a naturalistic worldview precluding gods and a life after death, and have human happiness as the goal of their ethics – have made a massive contribution to British political life in the past as well as today.

When the British Humanist Association was first officially formed, it was at a dinner in the Houses of Parliament, presided over by Baroness Wootton (who, as well as being a vice president of the BHA, was also the first woman appointed as a life peer).

There have, in fact, been many humanist parliamentarians, and they have also often been great reformers and activists.

As an MP, the secularist Charles Bradlaugh secured the right for Members of the Commons to affirm rather than to swear a religious oath on taking office in the late 19th century – a great advance for freedom of conscience.

Clement Attlee, who described himself 'incapable of religious feeling', saying that when it came to Christianity, he believed in the ethics, but not the 'mumbo-jumbo', was one of the greatest prime ministers of the 20th century, under whose premiership the NHS was formed. When we remind ourselves that Winston Churchill was not only very anti-religious in his youth but even in his old age agreed (in a letter to humanist and discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick) that he would rather not have a chapel in the Cambridge College founded in his name, we might add him to our list as well.

Humanist political thinkers abound. John Stuart Mill, the father of feminism as well as liberalism. Karl Popper, whose account of the open society continues as an inspiration to liberal democratic politicians across Europe and the world today. We might add Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes for their political and economic thought, and Jeremy Bentham for his.

Fenner Brockway, who campaigned for peace and colonial independence in the 20th century, is typical of the many humanist activists who have worked for social justice, democracy, the relief of poverty and education in Britain. Brockway, with many fellow humanists like Bertrand Russell, was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Humanists were similarly at the heart of the grassroots Chartist and Cooperative movements over a century before, and did the English radical campaigning spirit ever find a better bard than Percy Shelley (expelled from Oxford University for his atheism)?

Our political life is still full now with activists, campaigners, parliamentarians and thinkers who are doing good without gods, in spite of those who pretend that it is only with religion that people will engage in social action. That is true neither in the present nor in the past, and overweening assertions about what we owe to Britain's 'Christian Heritage' are all too common in our political discourse today.

Partly as a corrective to this, but also just as a celebration in its own right, it's great that we can celebrate our humanist heritage this Humanist Week.