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Writer, leader, romantic idealist

Still from Jill Craigie's 1945 film, The Way We Live

I wasn’t always an admirer of Michael Foot. In the heady 1981 summer of Warrington's by-election I was sixteen and, intoxicated by the SDP and Roy Jenkins, thought Foot the worn-out leader of a hollowed-out Labour tribe. His ideas were irrelevant to modern times, his party kept alive only by old-fashioned dogma and ritual. I still think his policies were wrong, then. I now realise though that Labour’s wasted years were not his fault, at least not primarily; I realise what a great writer and idealist he was; and I realise how much not just Labour but all our liberal and left politics owes to him.

… the Western world is gripped by the most perilous complex and perilous recession which we have seen since 1945. It is indeed, in my judgement, a crisis of Capitalism of a most formidable character, and we have to muster all our energies, all our skill, to deal with it. Let me start therefore by telling you what is my deepest instinct about the whole of this situation; it is of first importance for our country, and no less for our Labour movement, that this crisis should be faced and surmounted by a Labour government acting in the close alliance and good faith with the trade-union movement of this country. If we were to fall apart, I shudder to think what would be the consequences for our people, for our young people and old alike, in unemployment and in all the other associated consequences.

 

Speech to the Labour Party conference, 1976

It’s sometimes said Foot should have been a writer, never an active politician. I disagree: what’s most attractive and admirable about him is that he combined writing with political engagement, with real achievement in each field. But I do want to start with Foot the writer, because it’s the side of him less often commented on. He was a brilliant essayist with a flair for polemic evident in his wartime success Guilty Men. His short studies of his Labour and Tory colleagues and opponents – for instance in 1984’s Loyalists and Loners – are witty, instructive, often generous (including for instance about Enoch Powell) and sometimes devastating, in the case of George Brown, for instance. Only in the case of his bitter piece on David Owen do I (perhaps unsurprisingly) sense unfairness, his implied comparison with Oswald Mosley surely an outrageous one whatever the depth of their disagreement or his distaste for Owen's personality and choices. His great work though is his two-volume biography of Aneurin Bevan, the man he thought the greatest socialist but whose ideas have been strangely forgotten, beyond the fact of his "founding" the NHS. Bevan deserves to be remembered, and we have the great Bevanite Michael Foot to thank for this sympathetic record of his hero’s life and ideas. Having completed his life of Bevan, the great principled divider in a sense too big for party, Foot embarked upon an admirable career as an ultra-loyalist minister in the 1970s under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. As employment secretary in 1974 his passage of the Health and Safety at Work Act is an achievement that would, on its own, justify the career of any Labour politician: many lives have been saved by it. Later, as Leader of the House it was in great part his commitment and his work negotiating with the Liberals that kept Labour’s show on the road. His own defence of the record in government is worth reading.

... we carried through, sometimes by only one or two votes, a series of Socialist measures, manifesto commitments, more ambitious and consistent than anything the previous Labour Government (with its majority of 100 and Tony Benn in the Cabinet) had attempted. Moreover, the programme executed with such determination covered a whole range of policies - industrial relations, public ownership, the rescue of many industries large and small, the extension of social services and the fulfilment of long-standing promises on such items as child benefit, comprehensive education, the abolition of the tied cottage. Almost for the first time, a real concerted advance was made in extending women's rights: apart from the child benefit paid to the mother, new maternity rights were introduced, a Sex Discrimination Act was placed on the Statute Book, and the Equal Pay Act was brought into operation, despite all the other obstacles on the arena of pay policy.

 

Brother Tony, from Loyalists and Loners

Foot’s tragedy as Labour leader was that the now venerable loyalist and uniter had to contend with ferocious internal opposition from a new kind of Bevanist controversy, but this time caused by a more acute, dogmatic, ambitious and virulent strain of leftism: Bennery. It’s been funny to see Tony Benn wheeled out on television to pay tribute to Michael Foot, as though they were the finest old chums and comrades, back in the day. In truth Benn, having welcomed Foot’s leadership, tried to both use and destroy it, and to capture Labour for his own ends. The two men were fierce enemies in Labour’s most bitter battle.

1981 could and should have been the year in which the Labour movement applied all its energies to concert united vengeance for the wounds inflicted upon our people and to destroy the Tory Government. Instead, we turned it into a period of futility and shame, and the responsibility for transmuting every controversy of the time into an internal Labour Party dispute rested directly with Tony Benn.

 

Brother Tony, from Loyalists and Loners

To his credit, he faced down Benn and he took on Militant, a hard decision for a leader who’d condemned the witch-hunts of the Labour right against Bevan and his supporters in the fifties. Militant was not like the Bevanites, though, and though history has credited Neil Kinnock and his great 1985 speech with their defeat, it was Foot who started the fight-back. He failed to keep Labour together of course, but I doubt he could have done anything to prevent the split. Perhaps had Denis Healey been leader, he might have fought line-by-line for sensible social democratic policies and attacked Benn with an aggression just capable of inspiring other old Gaitskillites to stay and beat him. But in their very choice of Foot, Labour MPs had shrunk from, and Bennite MPs had cannily prevented, that strategy. Foot might well fight, fight and fight again, but not for the things the future SDP wanted. Foot actually believed in the key policies that (alongside the important internal rule changes like mandatory reselection and the electoral college, which were thoroughly Bennite victories) convinced the future SDP that Labour was no longer home. Given his own beliefs, he did all he could. I thought then, and think now, that Foot was wrong on all the big issues in the 1980s. On defence, he was a willing prisoner of the past, as a long-time opponent of nuclear weapons, unilateral disarmer and founder of CND. Looking again at Aneurin Bevan I can see that he and Bevan had a good case in the 1950s against Britain’s testing and making the bomb – perhaps I would have been with them, then. But the 1980s was the wrong time to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament as this country’s strategic choice, and remove US bases. In response to Moscow’s suppression of Czechoslovakia and Poland and its deployment of SS-20s in eastern Europe, we needed to hold firm to our alliances, as Bevan had realised in 1957, not cast them aside. Here is Foot on Bevan's rejection of outright unilateralism:

So why did he do it? Why had he risked so much and for what gain?... Was it true that Sam Watson in particular had taken him to a high mountain and shown him all the kingdoms of the earth, the offices and influence in the Labour Party which would be his...? … Of course it was true that Party considerations influenced his conduct, and why not? During that Friday and Saturday he saw more clearly than ever before the divisions that might occur if he refused to speak, if a new split developed. He saw the chasm opening at his feet, he saw the renewal of the old battles as the months went by, he saw the destruction of any hope for a new Labour government, he saw the accusations of his opponents – and perhaps of history – that he could have forestalled the catastrophe but that he had preferred the ease of his own conscience and the comfort of his friends. He saw the long trek back for the Bevanites and himself into the wilderness and the endless sojourn there, and he never had the taste, despite all the taunts, for martyrdom, for locusts and wild honey.

Aneurin Bevan

The INF treaty of 1987 vindicated NATO’s strategy: unilateral desertion of it by Britain would at best have given the USSR a little more time, at worst have undermined the strategy badly. On Europe, to withdraw immediately, less than a decade after our joining, after the voters had decided overwhelmingly to stay in and without consulting them further, would have been a foreign policy disaster. Only this weekend, a Dutch social democrat who remembers those days told me how disappointed she was by Margaret Thatcher's European policy. How much worse would Michael Foot's have been? Perhaps I should have said Foot was wrong on almost all the big issues - because he was undoubtedly and admirably right over the Falklands. Tony Benn opposed the retaking of the islands: his diaries show he wanted immediate UN negotiations on sovereignty, reflecting the (to be fair) pretty consistent "stop the war" position he has taken ever since on conflicts such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the war on Milosevic over Kosovo. Foot rightly saw the Falklands crisis in terms of the need to oppose, with force if need be, the unwarranted aggression of a brutal military dictatorship. He favoured action through the UN, of course, and required adherence to the Charter. Rightly so. But his preparedness to support the lawful use of force as the last resort shows his practical commitment to the ideals of that Charter. He wanted international structures to be an effective way of preventing and resisting aggression, not a procedural mask for inaction and appeasement, a stance that makes his opposition to the Iraq war all the more credible and persuasive. I remain a supporter of that conflict, but Foot’s opposition to it gave me infinitely greater pause than, say, George Galloway’s. So I think Michael Foot’s principles deserve re-evaluation, and that he has important things to teach the left. He wanted international control of nuclear weapons, and their ultimate abolition. The right aims, and although they can only be distant ones it is right to support Barack Obama now in his efforts to move us just a few short steps along the way. My concern is that perhaps the international community should be investing in missile defence, not abandoning it. And I wonder what it means we should do about Iran. Importantly, though, we're no longer in the 1980s, and it's less clear what an independent British deterrent is for. Perhaps we should think hard once more about whether it makes sense to stand by the decision Britain took in the different circumstances of the 1950s. On Europe, all but a few on the Labour side have now abandoned Foot’s thinking, and I would certainly not argue for a Euroscepticism effectively indistinguishable from that of Bill Cash. Even here, though, Foot can teach us something. First, that Euroscepticism is not an intrinsically Conservative attitude and that liberal internationalism does not require support for all the works of Brussels. Secondly, that talk of reclaiming national sovereignty by Act of Parliament is twisted-tongued nonsense. He’d surely have snorted derisively at David Cameron’s Canute-like pretensions. Finally: a lifelong radical, Michael Foot was very much a conservative when it came to the constitution, believing in Westminster and in our electoral system as superior to proportional systems and coalition politics. That’s an attitude well out of fashion on the left, but it’s neither right-wing nor obsolete. I’d like to see it revived.

He became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism … the critic of all principalities and powers, the incorrigible dissenter, the foremost sceptic and exponent of free thought throughout the last half-dozen decades was English to the core, as uniquely English as the free-thinking Whiggery in which he was reared and against whose complacencies and limitations he revolted.

 

On Bertrand Russell, Philosopher-Englishman, from Debts of Honour

Michael Foot was a romantic idealist whose admirable commitment to causes – the anti-nuclear cause and the cause of this country’s independent democratic model – won him Labour’s leadership when those causes suited others’ aims. But those same commitments led to wrong policy choices in the 1980s which disbarred him from forming a government. His real achievements as a minister deserve respect, his speaking talent admiration, and his ability and achievement as a writer amply deserve both: he leaves a rich legacy of socialist thought and history and has immortalised the political career of his greatest hero. His valiant, doomed attempt to keep the Labour family together and his resistance to Benn and the far left mean he deserves some of the credit for New Labour, too. This certainly amounts to greatness of a kind, and greatness in the service of excellent humanitarian aims: peace, justice, knowledge, a better world. Those who knew him also speak uniformly of his kindness, warmth and generosity – that can be no accident. For once, then, there is no trace of irony when we say Michael Foot was both a great and a good man.

This piece first appeared at The Wardman Wire

The Citizen Ethics Network

Steve Punter | CreativeCommons

Like Nick Baines, I welcome the launch of the Citizen Ethics Network, an initiative that can only be positive and that I, too, will be following. The wider and more democratic this conversation is, the better. Like every other reader I have favourites and, let’s say, "lesser favourites" among the contributors to the launch pamphlet but what really matters is to hear voices other than the great and good. I hope the debate takes off.

Again like Nick Baines, I admire politicians on the whole, and think it’s important they not be misunderstood. Undoubtedly they are motivated to a great extent by ideology: that is the aspect of the political mind that is most often ignored by journalists and the public, it seems to me. They are also motivated by personal ambition – by no means a bad thing – and calculation as well as conviction pervades everything they do. If we want politicians to be valued, we need to recognise and accept that. Robin Cook’s resignation over Iraq was widely admired, and rightly so. But the public ethics that denies Tony Blair’s genuine conviction over Iraq is the same distorted ethics that beatifies Cook for a move that was also, looked at realistically, a powerful marker for a Labour leadership bid. Many in his party wish he were still here.

What I think is wrong, though – and 180 degrees wrong, in the particular case of the Telegraph’s revelations about "expensesgate" – is to see the media as having some sort of duty to go easy on politicians, or to build up confidence in them. Expensesgate – not so much the claims themselves as the attempted cover-up satirised in last night’s BBC drama On Expenses – was a public scandal of such a scale that the Telegraph’s conduct was amply justified, and deserves both applause and reward. The same should go to Heather Brooke. An iron law of politics, and public ethics, is that the friendlier the media are to politicians, the less free citizens are. In Venezuela, the President even has his own, over-lengthy show. More Paxmanlike scrutiny is needed here, not less. And one positive change would be if we showed more appreciation of those politicians – Peter Hain, Ben Bradshaw and Margaret Beckett come to mind on the Labour side, but they have their counterparts in other parties – who are often ready to face such scrutiny, including that of studio audiences.

What I do worry about, and something I do think puts good people off politics, is today's routine invasion and even more routine surrender of privacy. People will always be interested in the lives of public figures: there was a joke in the 1970s about Ted Heath looking down on "the unemployed". But Heath’s solitary life would today be subjected to wholly wrong and damaging inspection; he would be expected to justify and explain himself. I have no ready solutions to the problem, though I support the Human Rights Act and agree with Max Mosley about privacy. But I do think we need to avoid a situation such as exists in America, where it is unimaginable that a single person could enter the White House. I fear we may be moving towards a new public hypocrisy in which gay people are more visible at all levels in society then ever before – yet anyone but married parents is effectively barred from the very top by a deeply conservative public morality. In the US, again, admirable republic though it is, no one could reach the White House without money. Or faith.

Mention of which brings me eventually to Rowan Williams, whose superficially anodyne article in the pamphlet complains about our society being influenced by a distorted version of Darwinism. I wonder in passing what social movement opposes, misunderstands, distorts and slanders Darwinism more than Christianity does. But I won’t pursue that. I’m more interested in Williams’s apple-pie thought that

the importance of the family isn’t a sentimental idealising of domestic life or a myth of patriarchy; it is about understanding that you grow in emotional intelligence and maturity because of the presence of a reality that is unconditionally faithful or dependable.

I like the way he tries to deflect feminist suspicion simply by the choice and juxtaposition of two words. Perhaps I'm hyper-sensitive about this marginal comment. But it seems to me to reflect just the kind of questionable "pro-family" attitude I’ve been complaining about, to my mind impliedly ranking Ted Heath below Gordon Brown as a public servant simply because Brown has a wife and children.

A real threat to our public ethics comes from the determination of some religious believers, and the readiness at least of their leaders, to justify and maintain discrimination on the grounds of personal sexual conduct. Parts of the media join in with glee. If we could get rid of that thinking, and the kind of hypocrisy that dares complain about bigotry after forcing a man to withdraw from a bishopric precisely in order to appease prurient bigots, our public ethics would be the better for it.

This piece first appeared at The Wardman Wire

The jury system is attacked from all sides – by those who believe juries cannot cope with fraud cases, by those who think they are prejudiced and now even by those who think them harsh on householders who defend themselves. Juries deserve our support, and this report suggests changes that could make their verdicts safer and better. Suspicion of juries, though, is merely a modern fear of democracy. Thomas's report vindicates many people's instinctive conviction that jury trial is the vital guarantee of fairness in the criminal justice system. Justice is less at risk from the prejudices of juries than from those of professionals and politicians.

Read my full piece on Professor Thomas's report, Are juries fair?, at Comment is Free.

A Christian is prevented from wearing a cross at work, though her employer lets Muslim workers wear the hijab, and Sikhs the kara. Clear discrimination, surely? So says Nadia Eweida, who yesterday took her case against BA to the Court of Appeal. Liberty's director Shami Chakrabarti supports her, arguing that BA's policy was an intrusion into religious freedom. Eweida's claim may indeed seem reasonable at first blush, but the principle she and Liberty argue for is wrong. I hope they fail.

Read my full piece on Nadia Eweida's case at Comment is Free.

The leadership is indeed now settled

Vali... | CreativeCommons

Today's "secret ballot" initative by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt appears already to have run into the snow. Hoon and Hewitt have chosen a desperate but inadequate dice to throw, have been outmaneouvred, and in any case have acted too late.

I understand the desperation. Although Gordon Brown's personal performance has improved and the fight is now being taken more effectively to the Conservatives, the truth remains that he as leader is the biggest drag on Labour's vote. The one thing the government could do to transform its chances at the general election would be to dump its leader. It should have done so last year. But for a pair of MPs with ministerial but Blairite pasts and no substantial political bases of their own, and who are both standing down from Parliament, to call for a transparent device to circumvent the normal consitutional rules, and for this call to be supported only by usual suspects like Charles Clarke and Frank Field - that, now, is surely too little to have real political effect. It can easily be characterised as "unconstitutional" and without doubt some constituency and union activists will be angered by the attempt to cut them out of the process. Those problems could be overcome if there were sufficient, directed momentum against Gordon Brown. There's clearly not. More seriously, though, their approach does nothing to resolve the question of who should succeed.

Second, it looks as though they've been wrong-footed. The timing of the coup, on this snowy day and immediately after Gordon Brown performed well at PMQs, seemed odd, and was odd. It could hardly have been more favourable to Downing Street. Perhaps they were somehow pre-empted or provoked to make their move when they did. Otherwise they made a mistake. Surely they should have waited at least for the immediate aftermath of some clear mis-step by Brown.

But in any case, this is too late. Labour should have replaced Gordon Brown some time ago, but the chance has gone, and they're stuck with him. Where were Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt last June, when James Purnell resigned? That was the chance to remove Brown. Hoon did resign from the Cabinet then in fact - but you, like me, may have missed that at the time. He said he was doing so for "family reasons", making no comment about Brown.

I suspect quite a few members and former members of the Cabinet suffer from a lack of political courage combined with a lack of political nous. It was obvious last June that that was the best, and last, chance to strike against Brown. I can understand the cowardice that led some people to do nothing then, although courage was surely easier for those whose careers were in any event ending and had nothing to lose, like Geoff Hoon. What I can't understand is their failing to realise that that inaction then was in effect a decision to go with Brown all the way.

The only thing that could seriously destablise the Prime Minister now would be either a major resignation - Alistair Darling's say, or Lord Mandelson's - or a direct challenge from David Miliband or Jon Cruddas. Mandelson and Darling back Brown. As far as Jon Cruddas is concerned, inaction makes sense: his goal of inheriting a left-shifting party this year depends on his having clean hands now.

Whether inaction makes sense for David Miliband, I don't know, and the question matters less than it did. He ought to have challenged last year, and his failure to do so was the outstanding failure of nous and courage. Now, he couldn't unseat Brown even if he did resign, and to do so would surely be mad. But his delay today in backing the Prime Minister makes his disloyalty clear, and damages his future. I think he missed his chance to be Prime Minister in 2009, and will never have as good a chance again.

If Hoon and Hewitt wanted, as they said, to settle the leadership issue one way or the other - well, they've succeeded in that.

Chris Grayling says householders should be protected by the law unless they react with "grossly disproportionate" force. The law on self-defence has only recently been clarified, in fact, and it's worth noting how friendly it already is to the victim of a burglary. It's long been clear that you are entitled to use reasonable force in defence of people or property. But section 76 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 spells out that whether the force you use is reasonable depends on the circumstances as you believed them to be – even if your belief was unreasonable. The jury must take into account that you cannot be expected to "weigh to a nicety" what you should do to defend yourself – and in effect, you get the benefit of the doubt if you only did what you honestly and instinctively thought necessary. What the law does not permit is disproportionate force; Grayling's proposal is that the ceiling on what a victim is entitled to do should be raised. But his response, making disproportionate force legitimate across the board, is itself disproportionate.

Read my full piece on Chris Grayling and his proposals following the Munir Hussain case, at Comment is Free.