Michael Foot II

In The First Post, and tastefully passing over Foot's aberrant views on Yugoslavia in the Nineties (he was also wrong about devolution in the Seventies and about State secularism all his life), Neil Clark writes:

The popular image of Michael Foot, the former Labour party leader whose death at 96 was announced today, is of an intellectually brilliant but rather dreamy political incompetent: a sweet and immensely loveable eccentric, who despite his great gifts, was silly enough to wear a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph and whose romantic attachment to old-fashioned socialism caused his party to suffer - in 1983 - their heaviest electoral defeat for 50 years.

The reality is rather different. Far from being a hopeless dreamer, Foot was in fact a shrewd and pragmatic political operator whose career was far from unsuccessful. He was much more than a great orator; he was in fact much more special than people have given him credit for.

Michael Foot was a man of enormous talents. A superb polemical journalist, who made his name attacking the Tory appeasers of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, he became the editor of the Evening Standard before his 30th birthday. His biography of his socialist hero Nye Bevan remains one of the greatest political books of all time. He was also arguably the most inspirational public speaker of his generation.

Foot, who first became a Labour MP in 1945, did not serve in government until he was in his 60s. But his record in office was impressive. In the Labour government elected in February 1974, Foot, as Minister of Employment, acted as a conduit between the unions and the government at a time of great industrial unrest.

He helped settle the miners' strike, which had brought down the Conservatives, and oversaw the implementation of the 'Social Contract', the agreement between Labour and the unions under which the government undertook to repeal anti-trade union laws and introduce various policies to help working people, in return for pay restraint from the unions.

Foot proved an extremely competent minister and his time in office was marked by the introduction of ground-breaking legislation which improved the lives of millions of ordinary working people.

The Employment Protection Acts established tribunals to deal with cases of unfair dismissal and gave working women rights to maternity leave. The Health and Safety at Work Act protected people from injury and illness in the workplace.

After Foot became Labour's deputy leader and Leader of the House in 1976, he once again showed his practical skills, playing a key role in negotiating the Lib-Lab Pact, which helped keep Labour in power after they lost their parliamentary majority in 1977.

In 1980, Foot became the leader of his party at the age of 67. Popularly portrayed as someone totally unsuited to a leadership role, he in fact did a remarkably good job.

Labour had descended into civil war following their election defeat in May 1979 and Foot faced an enormously difficult task. Although he was unable to prevent the breakaway of the so-called Gang of Four - a quartet of right-wing former ministers who left to set up the SDP - he did manage to keep the rest of his disunited and quarrelsome party together and start it on its long road back to power.

Neil Kinnock, Foot's successor and protegee got the credit for Labour’s revival, but we should not forget that it was Foot who was at the helm during the Labour's darkest hours.

Labour's left-wing manifesto in the 1983 election, famously labelled the "longest suicide note in history", is routinely blamed for the party's heavy defeat. But the truth is that Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives, their popularity boosted by the success of the Falklands War the previous year, and enthusiastically supported by a partisan media, were always going to win a handsome victory, regardless of what policies Michael Foot and Labour advocated.

Had the Falklands War ended in a British defeat, or if the islands had never been invaded at all, then things might have been very different. In December 1981, with unemployment rising dramatically, Margaret Thatcher had received the lowest approval ratings ever recorded by any British prime minister.

We shouldn't blame Michael Foot's leadership of the Labour Party for the Thatcherite domination of the 1980s: it was the Gang of Four who were responsible for splitting the non-Tory vote - and General Galtieri of Argentina for invading the Falklands.
Had Michael Foot become Prime Minister in early 1983, there is no reason why he should not have made a success of it. Our national assets would not have been flogged off and our North sea oil revenues would have been used for the benefit of the whole nation.

And we would have had as our Prime Minister a truly exceptional man - whose enormous talents stand in stark contrast to the mediocre bunch of politicos who have followed him.

See also Neil's Guardian article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1983 General Election:

It was famously labelled (by the embryonic New Labourite Gerald Kaufman) as "the longest suicide note in history". Labour's 1983 manifesto was blamed by many – including the former prime minister, James Callaghan – for the party suffering a calamitous defeat in the general election held 25 years ago this week.

But was the manifesto really that bad?

Labour planned to counter a savage recession, which had led unemployment to rise to its highest level for 50 years, with an unashamedly Keynesian £11bn "emergency programme of action". The programme involved a five-year economic plan and massive investment in industry. To make sure the extra spending was not soaked up by imports, and to safeguard key industries, import duties would, if necessary, be imposed. Labour's manifesto also promised to re-impose exchange controls – scrapped by the Tories in 1979 – in order to "counter currency speculation and to make available – to industry and government in Britain – the large capital resources that are now flowing overseas".

To help its programme of industrial regeneration, Labour advocated the setting up of a "national investment bank" to put new resources from private institutions and from the government – including North Sea oil revenues – "into our industrial priorities".

Regarding North Sea oil itself, Labour pledged to set up a new "powerful national oil company" in pursuance of its objective of bringing the North Sea oil industry into public ownership. The Tories' programme of privatisation would be halted – and a new programme of public ownership initiated. In addition to re-nationalising the industries already sold off, "significant public stakes would be taken in electronics, pharmaceuticals, health equipment and building materials; and also in other important sectors, as required in the national interest".

Acknowledging that its "radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy" would be in conflict with the rules of the treaty of Rome, Labour said it would withdraw from the EEC within the lifetime of the next parliament.

In foreign policy, Labour pledged to help improve relations between east and west by restoring detente and promised to work "consistently for peace and disarmament". The party called for the ratification of Salt II and opposed the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in western Europe.

In its mission to create a "fairer Britain", Labour pledged to restore the link between pensions and average earnings – broken by Thatcher in 1980. A new annual tax of personal wealth would be introduced, targeting the richest 100,000 of the population. Part-time workers were to be given the same employment rights as full-time workers.

Some of the 1983 proposals – such as devolution to Scotland and Wales, a Freedom of Information Act, and equal rights for part-time workers – were eventually enacted by Labour after it came to power in 1997. But the bulk of the manifesto was never implemented. A relentless anti-Labour campaign by much of the media – aided by rightwing figures within the party – together with the splitting of the anti-Tory vote on account of the SDP secession, meant that the Conservatives were returned in 1983 with a greatly increased majority, even though their share of the vote was actually lower than in 1979.

A quarter of a century on and we're still experiencing the consequences of that victory.

That moment in 1983 was the last great opportunity to derail the neoliberal bandwagon before it did lasting damage to the UK's economic and social fabric. Labour's emergency programme of action would have halted the de-industrialisation of Britain and removed the spectre of mass unemployment from the land. The re-imposition of exchange controls would have put a break on the growing power of international finance; thanks to Thatcher's deregulatory measures – money power was soon to rule the roost.

The yawning wealth gap, already starting to develop in 1983, would have been reversed by Labour's staunchly progressive tax policies.

Pensioners would have seen their living standards rise, due to the link being restored between average earnings – it's been calculated that if the link had not been broken, a basic state pension for a single pensioner would now be worth £145.15 a week.

The huge increase in homelessness that Britain witnessed in the late 1980s would have been avoided, due to Labour's halting of council house sales and its commitment to public housing.

As to the issue of privatisation – is there anyone, outside of extremist neoliberal thinktanks and those who made a financial killing from it – who still thinks it was a success? Britain has the most expensive and unreliable railway system in Europe (despite receiving over four times more in taxpayer subsidy than British Rail). Our privatised airports are an international disgrace, while the hiving off of key services in NHS hospitals, such as cleaning and catering, has proved disastrous. "Look at the various parts of the national infrastructure that have been privatised, and practically all of them have gone downhill: buses, trains, water, power" – the verdict not of a "hard left" ideologue, but the businessman and designer Sir Terence Conran.

Then there's North Sea oil. Labour's plans for public ownership of North Sea oil was derided by the free-market fanatics back in 1983. Yet there was a country that did follow a statist path to developing its oil wealth: Norway, which now has the second highest per-capita GDP in the world. Adherence to free-market dogma meant Britain squandered the massive financial bonanza that North Sea oil represented; money that could have been spent on industrial regeneration instead went on paying people not to work.

In foreign policy, Labour's espousal of detente would have made more likely the dream of many progressives that the cold war would end not with the "victory" of one side over another, but with a fusion between east and west: with the communist countries in the east becoming progressively more liberal, and western countries becoming progressively more socialist. And pulling out of the EEC would not only have saved British taxpayers a fortune, but enabled Britain to maintain its national sovereignty, free from EEC/EU constraints on state intervention in the economy.

In truth the real "suicide note" in 1983 election was the Conservative party manifesto, which, with its dogmatic espousal of free-market policies, put on us on the road we are today: a debt-ridden, privatised service economy with massive differentials in wealth; a country where the majority of people – working class and middle class – are exploited by an unaccountable, transnational corporate and financial elite. A society where everything has a price, but nothing a value, where the profit motive dominates every aspect of our lives. Worse still, the Thatcherite, neoliberal model is one that has been exported to other countries around the world, including eastern Europe, with similarly disastrous consequences.

"The defeat for the Labour party in the early 1980s was not only a defeat for the Labour party but also a defeat for decency all over the world" said Michael Foot, the party's much maligned leader in 1983.

The events of the past 25 years have proved him absolutely right.