Top journalist who helped win Birmingham Six’s freedom dies

BRITISH campaigning journalist, author and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy has died aged 89, his agent said yesterday.

He died of pneumonia at a nursing home in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

Kennedy made his reputation with decades of work trying to right miscarriages of justice.

Several of his books question the convictions of a number of notable cases in Britain, including “36 murders and 2 immoral earnings”, which details his work on the case of the Birmingham Six, whose freedom he helped win in 1991 after they had spent 16 years in jail falsely accused of two IRA pub bombings.

Kennedy’s judicial campaigning contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965. He was a familiar face on television and presented BBC’s Panorama current affairs show in 1959 after failing to win a Liberal parliamentary seat.

He was knighted in 1994 for services to journalism.

“Ludovic Kennedy was one of the great thinkers of his generation,” said Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg.

A leading humanist, Kennedy helped found the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and in 1999 published “All in the Mind: Farewell to God” in which he characterised God as a creation of human beings rather than the reverse.

Hanne Stinson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said Kennedy was a “stalwart supporter of the BHA and a progressive campaigner on many fronts. He will be sorely missed.”