Foot? Balls!

THE DEATH of former British Labour leader Michael Foot is sad for his family and friends but it’s nothing to be concerned about politically.

Despite the effusive tributes paid him by newspapers and politicians, including one David Cameron, Foot’s political legacy is not something that the left should be in a rush to eulogise.

Foot was never a radical – and not much of a socialist, truth be told. He supported wage restraint during the inflationary 1970s – hardly the act of a friend of the working class. Strike one. He attacked Irish political hunger strikers, supporting Thatcher’s criminalisation policy. Strike two.

He cheer-led then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pointless military adventures in the Falkands war. In fact, Foot’s parliamentary speech favouring blasting the Argies outflanked Thatcher herself. Strike three – and come the general election just a year later he was out.

True, during his time as Labour leader his politics of old-fashioned Western European state socialism did appear represent a challenge to the neo-liberal orthodoxies then being fashioned by Thatcher and Reagan. In reality, though, even in 1982 Foot was a throwback to a bygone era. His austere postwar politics were socialist-tinged to be sure, but they weren’t socialist. By the time the mid-1970s rolled around the era of ‘stagflation’ and the oil crises had made the consensus a busted flush.

Few people knew it then but the New Right was on the rise, led by the Institute of Economic Affairs, and politics was about to disappear altogether, trumped by what would later turn out to be a distinctly un-heady cocktail of managerialism and economics. Against this new era dawning, Foot represented the drab and grey past, memories of rationing and a shortage of consumer goods. The positive things brought about by the likes of Foot, such as the National Health Service and free university attendance, were taken for granted – mistakenly as it later transpired.

But let’s not give Foot him too much credit. He was often blamed by figures on the right of Labour for destroying the party by moving it too far to the left. Indeed, it was while Foot’s hand was at the tiller that David Owen and co jumped ship to form the Social Democratic Party – but does this mean Foot was a socialist firebrand?

Hardly. During the late 1970s, for instance, Foot was an instrumental figure in the Liberal-Labour pact, hardly the stuff visions of freeing humanity from toil and alienation are made of.

Foot’s problem was that his vision of society seemed backward by the time he was heading the party. No Labour leader could have brought the party to victory in 1983 election on a traditional platform of nationalisation. By contrast Thatcher was riding-high on a wave of jingoism following the Falklands war and, despite her disastrous economic policies causing mass unemployment the like of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s, managed to project an aura of optimism and future-orientation that caught the popular imagination.

Foot’s death isn’t tragic but not because he was bad person – he was by all accounts a decent and thoughtful man – but simply because he was 96 years old. Politically, though, Foot died decades ago. True, he was the last ever leader of the Labour party worthy of the name – Kinnock transformed the party beyond recognition – but the Labour party had been a drag on working class aspiration for some time before his ascension to the leadership.

JASON WALSH is the editor of forth, doesn’t own a donkey jacket and has met cups of camomile tea more radical than Michael Foot