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.




