Couldn’t they just turn him off and turn him on again?

This isn't about his beliefs but his advocacy for a particular cause. Given your political beliefs I can imagine you'd hope that his beliefs were neither here nor there, however the most certainly were there and clearly important to him, and so should be remembered here (there and everywhere).

Pretending that it's not relevant to his memory is like pretending civil rights shouldn't be discussed when remembering Rosa Parks, or talking about Gina Miller simply as a barrister or Eddie Izzard only as a comedian.

Edited by CambridgeEagle (14 Mar 2018 2.12pm)

I remember walking to the Oval last summer and My wife, a doctor at Great Ormond Street and researching the mental health impacts traumatic brain injuries in children, telling me excitedly about the article in the Guardian and the speech given by Prof Hawking about the NHS and the damage being wilfully done to it by the government. She's experienced the impact of cuts first hand and the pressure on children's services, especially in mental health, and has often been driven to tears over some of the things she's witnessed, which are a direct consequence of government mismanagement. She was excited as this was a person with a huge profile and masses of respect for his intellect and triumph over adversity. To hear of his experience of care and treatment was humbling, and to read his analysis of what Hunt et al are doing to the NHS was saddening. But to know that you have someone with that cache and influence standing up for you was a real comfort and source of hope. It gave her a feeling of added weight behind the desperate calls for adequately resourcing the NHS.

I felt starstruck every time I met Hawking, and enjoyed reading his books, but it is the loss of this advocate that I most regret and I hope we can achieve the results he was fighting for.

To pretend that he wasn't campaigning for this right up until he died is an insult to his memory.

Intelligent insight as always.

R.I.P. Thread.

No Hawking justified his political suoport for labour on the NHS as the founding of it was opposed by the tories politically.

Look it up.