Any Such Thing

29th April 1982:

Sir Bernard Braine (Essex, South-East): Is the right hon. Gentleman excluding from his thoughts the fact that 988 we are dealing with a Fascist State where thousands of people have disappeared without trace in recent years? Does he think it right and proper that people of British stock who live in a small democracy should be left at the mercy of that State for one moment longer than is necessary?

Mr. Foot: I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman about the Fascist character of the regime in the Argentine. I have been as bitterly and as strongly—in some respects, more strongly—opposed to such regimes as Conservative Members. I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Hertfordshire, South (Mr. Parkinson), who attends some of the special war Cabinets of the right hon. Lady, will speak on these matters. A few weeks or months ago he was toasting the regime in the Argentine. Certainly I have never been guilty of any such thing.

Foot went on to have a moment of madness over Yugoslavia, but he fulsomely opposed the war in Iraq, a war cheered on by those who had toasted, as they had been paid to toast, every merely anti-Soviet regime from Santiago and Buenos Aires, via Port-au-Prince, Manilla and Jakarta, to Pretoria (where the Queen had been deposed) and Salisbury (where the Queen had purportedly been deposed, by those who had committed high treason against Her Majesty). But at least they were merely the cheerleaders. They were cheering on those who had toasted, as they had been paid to toast, either the Soviet Union itself or the Trotskyist distinction without a difference. Also something of which Foot, hammer of the likes of Peter Tatchell, was never guilty.