History of England 1-6

Michael Foot was born in Plymouth into an overtly political family of Liberals, who naturally held the ascendancy in the West Country. Since his father, Isaac Foot, was elected MP for Plymouth on two separate occasions and subsequently became the city’s lord mayor, it would be fair to assume that the young Foot had inherited the mantle of influence. He was a clever child; his headmaster declared that ‘he has been the leading boy in the school in every way’, and he naturally took the familiar path to Oxford and then moved on to the presidency of the Oxford Union. This was a time of political transition, as the Liberal party slowly gave way to the burgeoning Labour party. Foot soon identified himself as a socialist, in part under the influence of Stafford Cripps, the father of a close friend, and in part propelled by the poverty of Merseyside and Liverpool, of which he had been previously unaware – there had been no such sights in Plymouth. He learned the reality as a shipping clerk in Birkenhead immediately after leaving Oxford. He also read voraciously to bolster his newfound beliefs: Bennett, Wells, Shaw, Russell and others were all on his new curriculum.

Foot began his political career in journalism, moving from the New Statesman to Tribune and then to the Evening Standard, of which at the age of twenty-eight he was appointed editor. He went on to the Daily Herald, a fully paid-up organ of the Labour party, and then reverted to Tribune, in January 1937. He had a thorough understanding of the left-wing press in England, and equally knew the spite and prejudices of right-wing proprietors like Northcliffe, who dominated the political debates of the day.

Along with two colleagues, he wrote a tract entitled Guilty Men attacking the appeasement of the Chamberlain government, before becoming the most celebrated of the anti-war journalists. He became an integral part of the English dissenting Left and a close ally of Aneurin Bevan, the greatest and most eloquent of workingclass politicians. Foot’s political rise reached its first summit in 1945 with his election as Labour MP for Devonport.

He lost the election of 1955 by just one hundred votes and renewed his editorship of Tribune at the time of Suez. On the issue of the enveloping nuclear fear of that decade, Foot and Bevan were at odds, with Bevan veering towards the nuclear option so as to avoid ‘going naked into the conference chamber’. Nevertheless, Foot was strongly supported by committed unilateralists like Frank Cousins. After his return to parliament in 1960, representing Bevan’s old constituency, he embarked on another phase of his life with his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In its first years it was a national phenomenon but gradually it began to lose support. Gaitskell pledged to ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’ against unilateralism, and the ragtag procession of activists began to seem less relevant in the changing world. There were many in CND who hated the Labour party, and there were many in Labour who were indifferent to the issue of nuclear disarmament. So his return to the Labour party was fractious and troubled, but his abiding pleasure came in his representation of Ebbw Vale, which was equivalent to going home.

By 1974, when he was sixty-one, Foot had become a member of the cabinet in Harold Wilson’s government. As secretary of state for employment, his primary purpose was to administer the Social Contract, with no fewer than six bills for the purpose of uniting the trade unions with the Labour party. Two of the major proposals were the establishment of ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) and the Employment Protection Bill, to defend the rights of workers. He was the most prominent socialist in the cabinet and believed he had every right to stand as the leading left-wing leadership candidate, after the resignation of Harold Wilson. He did not succeed but did sufficiently well to become in effect deputy prime minister under James Callaghan. It was a time of pacts and alliances, and Foot led the way to a ‘Lib–Lab’ pact late in the spring of 1977, though it fell apart in the following year.

After Callaghan’s defeat in 1979, Foot returned to the opposition. Then, with the political demise of Callaghan, a vacancy revealed itself. Three candidates stepped forward – Denis Healey, Peter Shore and Jon Silkin – but each exhibited an Achilles heel, and Foot emerged as leader in late 1980. It cannot be said that he was a natural leader, though he was not helped by the split between the Labour party and the SDP at the beginning of 1981.