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Foot Soldier

Sad news. The death of Old Labour seems confirmed with the death of the great Michael Foot, an idealist and Labour leader whose "longest suicide note in history" was none other than a long list of ethically valid and visionary demands. Foot falls into the category of those "peace mongers" and gadflys who sometimes get into positions of genuine power (one thinks of Jimmy Carter, perhaps Obama) and are then accused of weakness when their integrity and goodwill is thwarted by wicked and small-minded men and women, who argue that what is actually needed is electability and pragmatism. Stuff and nonsense. AH was electable, so was Bush. A lot of very evil people have been practical - see Arendt. In fact, what the world has always needed are idealists, dreamers, and far-seers - and those are the ones that too often get defeated, by the likes of Thatcher and co. Sadly, too, Tony Blair came along and sleeked and slicked the Foot vision, in the process getting elected to a vacuous platform in which, it now appears, only the interests of the rich and powerful were truly served (including arms companies, war mongers, and high financiers). Labour became comfortable with the filty rich, and less comfortable with the dirty poor. Foot's death reminds us of roads not taken. Brown could have been a Foot soldier, but has fought different battles. David Cameron is Thatcher Lite. What a world.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting, but surely vision isn't just the preserve of the ethically 'good' (whatever that is). Visionaries are just as, if not more IMO, likely to commit evil acts as pragmatists. To some extent, I think it's a false dichotomy.
Anonymous said…
I had the great good fortune to write for (lefty, Orwell-publishing newspaper) Tribune while Michael Foot was at the head of the board of directors. I can't say I met him but once or twice when I was in the office I heard him utter a magnificent 'harrumph' from beyond the parti-wall. Whatever else one might think about him, he was one of the last politicians who was also an intellectual. After Foot, the Labour Party was taken over by lost boys (Kinnock) and the selfishly ambitious (Blair, Brown). It would be very tempting to say something apocalyptic, such as 'the death of Foot is the death of socialism' but, alas, the death of socialism preceded that of Michael Foot by several decades. His finest hour, wihtout doubt, was turning up to the Cenotaph in his donkey jacket - an 'event' which revealed just how shallow British politics and its lackey media had become and, rather ironically and cruelly, encouraged the X Factor approach to politics which, after Thatcher was elected, became commonplace and rampant. Foot was, to my mind, the last politician for whom the message was not only more important than the medium, it was entirely divorced from it. He was, therefore, the Lenin of the Welfare State, a great man whose legacy should not be stamped on by the institutional evasion of Brown or the nonsense promises of Cameron. When the election comes, the media will foist some fake 'ethical' issues in our direction. The real morality will be ignored. Maybe 'Foot - the last of the politicians' shuold be his epitaph. Those who have followed him, after all, have all been employed in PR.

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