Opinion piece published Romford Recorder, Newham Recorder, East London & Docklands Advertiser April 2025.
Annie Besant was a pioneer of women’s rights in East London. Her beliefs and achievements are remarkably relevant to today’s fraught US trade talks.
Besant’s prominence in the 1888 Match Girls strike is celebrated by a plaque in Bow. in 1877 she and fellow campaigner Charles Bradlaugh published one of the first books on birth control. It incurred the Church’s wrath and resulted in a criminal prosecution which grabbed the then headlines. Bradlaugh founded the National Secular Society in 1866, and Besant was one of its original members.
Secularism is about separating the state from religion. It supports equality under the law, irrespective of religion or belief. It opposes the religious dictating the law on how women must live and treat their own bodies – seen at its most extreme in theocracies like Afghanistan or Iran.
Religious fundamentalists have now captured the levers of power in the US. This has gone hand in hand with the roll back of women’s rights there, and an upsurge in US funding of anti-choice Christian pressure groups here.
At the end of March the US State Department tweeted concern about freedom of expression over the arrest of an anti-abortion activist in the UK. A US charity is funding her case. An insider to the trade negotiations said ‘no free trade without free speech,’ according to the Telegraph.
These concerns about free speech are unfounded. They distort the truth about UK laws on abortion clinic buffer zones. Our laws do not stop people from protesting against abortions, or from praying. They simply prevent them from acting in a way likely to cause alarm or distress. People can protest or pray from 150 metres away. The laws are designed to strike a fair balance of freedoms. They address the well-documented problem of ‘in your face’ harassment of women seeking a lawful medical procedure.
Everyone should be free to practice their religion or belief. But Besant understood 150 years ago the importance of Government keeping their noses out of this and not privileging any religion or belief above another. This is the best way to protect everyone’s rights.
It is hard to know just how much influence US religious zealots have in the trade talks. But any attempt to use the negotiations to impose their views on reproductive rights here must be called out and resisted.
Paul Kaufman
Chairperson East London Humanists
