Reginald Freeson
Reginald Yarnitzy Freeson, environmental consultant, journalist, politician, Zionist: born London 24 February 1926;
- The name of Reg Freeson, who has died aged 80, has became so identified with his political "murder" by the ambitious Ken Livingstone in 1987 that his earlier record as one of the most successful "sensible left" Labour MPs and ministers has been almost forgotten. But Ken wanted Reg's parliamentary seat at Brent East, in north-west London, and after a long and ferocious struggle succeeded in replacing him.
- The ousting had nothing to do with any great political gap between the two men. Freeson was a leftwinger with a classic record of supporting Irish unity, resisting racism - he edited the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight from 1964 to 1967 - opposing the Vietnam war and championing the underprivileged. He was a founder member of CND and one of the first five Labour MPs on the initial Aldermaston march. The only dividing issue was that he was a socialist Zionist while Livingstone was pro-Arab.[1]
- He was an evolving socialist, even in the revisionist Blairite days, and his Zionism moved on, too. As political secretary of the Poale Zion-Labour Zionists, in 1998 he urged an independent Palestinian state embracing the West Bank and Gaza. [1]
An obituary in the Independent by Tam Dalyell noted:
- The fate of his parents is unclear, but at the age of five he was accepted by the Jewish orphanage in West Norwood, where he stayed until he was 14. He was always grateful to the rabbis who, albeit they were strict, gave him a sound education. In 1941 the family with whom he was living having left the orphanage was bombed out in the Blitz and at 17 Freeson volunteered for the RAF...
- After North Africa and a spell in Italy he was selected for an organisation called the Inter Services Publications Unit. He once showed me some rather moving articles that he had written describing how this Londoner had been absolutely shocked and appalled by the poverty of the Middle East. After the revelations about the concentration camps in 1945 he espoused the Zionist cause and became a devotee of Chaim Weizmann.
- Freeson was rather an internal Israeli and I heard him in a long evening tell Dick Crossman that he had had great reservations about the extremists of Irgun Zwei Leumi. Subsequently he was to become highly esteemed by both David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir...
- On demobilisation in 1948 he became a journalist, working for John Bull, Everybody's Weekly, Tribune, the News Chronicle and the Daily Mirror, and served for a time as an assistant press officer with the Ministry of Works and the British Railways Board.
- Even those who quarrelled with him would concede this. An example is that, although he was a Zionist and a passionate supporter of the state of Israel, in 1982 he spoke out against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon - which he knew would make him very unpopular with many in Israel.
Career
- MP (Labour) for Willesden East 1964-74, for Brent East 1974-87;
- PPS to Minister of Transport 1964-67;
- Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Power 1967-69;
- Minister for Housing and Local Government 1969-70;
- Minister for Housing and Construction and Urban Affairs 1974-79;
- PC 1976;
- chairman of the Warsaw Memorial Committee from 1964 to 1971,
- Editor, Jewish Vanguard 1987-2006[2]
