Letter: Free radical

Sir: I cannot think that Harold Laski, the originator of "Thought for the Day" on 9 October, would have welcomed your description of him as an "English churchman". Quite apart from the fact that he was Jewish, he had very little to do with religion of any kind; he was a political scientist, Professor of Political Sciences at the LSE for a period, and Chairman of the Labour Party in 1945-6.

The quotation you print came, I think, from a speech he made in Newark at the height of the general election in 1945, when he was reported by the Newark Advertiser as also saying, "As for violence, if Labour cannot obtain what it needs by general consent, we shall have to use violence even if it means revolution." Laski subsequently started an action for libel against the newspaper, which he lost. The trial was used as a model of advocacy (on the part of Patrick Hastings, who appeared for the defence) in Richard Du Cann's book The Art of the Advocate.

CHRISTOPHER GOSLAND

Bristol