RIP Michael Foot

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Former Labour leader Michael Foot has passed away, at the age of 96.

Raised in a a Liberal family, he joined the Labour party at university, and his political career stretched from the 1930s to 1980s, which ended with defeat in the 1983 election. This extract from Dominic Sandbrook’s review of Michael Foot: a Life by Kenneth O Morgan explains the great English radical tradition from which he came.

He grew up at the heart of an extraordinary nonconformist West Country family, in an atmosphere of fervent progressivism and almost demented bookishness: as one observer put it, it was “bacon for breakfast, Liberalism for lunch and Deuteronomy for dinner”.

Indeed, the joy of Morgan’s early chapters is that they show just how deeply Foot drank from the wellsprings of England’s native radical traditions. He knew Hazlitt and Swift so well that they might have been his next-door neighbours, while Oliver Cromwell was such a family hero that any academic or journalist reckless enough to criticise him could expect a stern letter. No modern politician, in fact, had a richer cultural inheritance, but it was Liberalism, not socialism, that drove him on.

For a long time it seemed as though Foot would be remembered merely as a brilliant essayist and inveterate rebel. As the author of the fierce anti-appeasement tract, Guilty Men, he had an excellent war, but his early years as a Labour MP never really led anywhere. He was really a pamphleteer rather than a politician, hopelessly infatuated with such heroes as Bevan and Beaverbrook, and he spent more time writing about 18th-century letters than thinking about post-war Britain’s economic problems.

In fact he went on to become leader, losing the 1983 election. Today Foot’s brand of socialism seems like something from another world, and though most of us here will not have agreed with his politics, we can all agree that, like most of the politicians with whom we do not agree, he was a good man who loved his country and wanted to make it even better – and his rhetorical powers were quite fantastic. Ultimately the British public made their decision and he retired with grace.

Even in this imperfect and sometimes poisonous online world, I hope that people on this side of the political divide show respect to a grand old man. And who knows, maybe others will then show the same decency when Margaret Thatcher’s time comes.

[Poshpost]

The last of the few? Even at 96 a great loss, and lets remember he died as Mr. Michael Foot, no CBE, OBE, MBE, or Lord. Why? Because he refused to take any honours, he said he never would and he didn't.

[Lounge Lizard]

"And who knows, maybe others will then show the same decency when Margaret Thatcher’s time comes." - and pigs might fly.
How insulting to make a comparison with Twatcher on the day Michael Foot dies.

[k979aaa]

Michael Foot was the best leader of the labour party!. And prime minister of the UK we never had he held principle above popularity and and never given into the capitalist's of this nation and abroad it is with sad regret we all have seen him pass away may he Rest In Peace and condolences to all his family and many friends and to his football club for which he supported through thick and thin!.

[bexhil palace]

Didn't Plymouth Argyle register him as a player once a few years back?
Or am i drunk again?

[Lemuel]

I heard Michael Foot speak in The Glasgow Appollo 1983? He electrified that audience and many others with the power of his oratory. He was no seeker of personal glory nor wealth and was an inveterate peace monger. The antipathy of Blair.

[k979aaa]

Didn't Plymouth Argyle register him as a player once a few years back?
Or am i drunk again?

They did and he was given the number 90 shirt and to stay firmly on the left and never go near the midfield according to some fellow on the BBC!. Pity his predecessors did not follow his actions and principles in the name of NEW LABOUR!.

[smokerjim]

Didn't Plymouth Argyle register him as a player once a few years back?
Or am i drunk again?

They did and he was given the number 90 shirt and to stay firmly on the left and never go near the midfield according to some fellow on the BBC!. Pity his predecessors did not follow his actions and principles in the name of NEW LABOUR!.

According to wikipedia, he was registered as an honourary player ( aged 90 ) which effectively made him the oldest registered player in the Football League! TBH, he was before my time - I was only 8 when he lost the 83 election, and still politically unaware - but since then I've learnt that he was Old Labour, ( which seeing the current shower of ZaNu Labour is no bad thing ), and the fact that the 83 Election Manifesto contained EVERY resolution passed at conference as a show of internal democracy ( great idea, but not popular with a tome reaching 700 pages....as Gerald Kaufman wryly noted after the defeat "It was the longest suicide note in history" )....but looking on wikiquote, there are loads attributed to him, including this one from a speech in the House from 1976....but equally relevant today ( so much for progress )

The crisis afflicting this country, along with other countries of the Western world, is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the dominant economic system that prevails in all those countries.