He was a British Labour MP for nearly 30 years, noted for promoting private member's bills to decriminalise male homosexual relations and liberalise the divorce laws.

He was in Cairo in 1944 when some of the British military personnel stationed there set up a "Forces Parliament" in which they debated the structure of society they wanted to see in the post-war world.

Abse's idealistic left-wing views were fully in tune with the majority opinion among the lower ranks at its meetings, but the existence of the "Parliament" disturbed the senior officers.

When Abse moved a motion supporting nationalization of the Bank of England he was arrested and the Forces Parliament was forcibly dissolved.

Unusually for a town in the South Wales valleys at that time, the National Union of Mineworkers was not in control of the nomination of West's successor as Labour candidate, since Pontypool was a centre of the railway industry.

Abse made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 22 January 1959 on the subject of education, mentioning that he had a primary school in his constituency which had two classes of over 50 pupils in one room.

In the mid-1960s, Abse began corresponding with members of the British Humanist Association and other MPs and peers who were non-religious and had shared ethical views and political ambitions.

[8] In 1957 the Wolfenden Report had recommended that the law be changed to decriminalise consenting male homosexual sex, but the government had taken no action.

He kept pressing the issue, and after Humphry Berkeley (Conservative MP for Lancaster) lost his seat in the 1966 general election, Abse became the main sponsor for the legalisation.

He fought in the House of Commons for the enactment of his committee's recommendations, and continued the fight in 1980 when the Conservative MP John Corrie proposed a bill along similar lines: Abse refused to compromise on a limit of 24 weeks.

Abse added to his reputation for taking maverick stances by strongly urging that British forces be withdrawn from Northern Ireland.

In Wotan, My Enemy (1994) Abse took a psychoanalytic approach to explaining the origin of British hostility to Germany and the idea of the European Union.

He analysed the tendency for men to engage in risky behaviour by placing their trust in women whom they barely knew and linked it to political developments.