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Michael Foot: God's Englishman
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Mar 03, 2010 02:25pm |
| Category | Op-Ed by Candidate |
| News Date | Mar 03, 2010 09:00am |
| Description | Britain is a poorer place without Michael Foot. He may have been the least successful Labour leader of the post-war period. But he was a committed patriot, who saw Labour politics as being part of a continuing tradition that stretched back to the Civil War. His father, a Liberal MP, once remarked: “The only thing I want to know about a man is which side he should like his ancestors to have fought on at Marston Moor”. Michael agreed, albeit with a difference: his father was an uncomplicated Cromwellian, whereas Michael drew his own inspiration – as, to an extent, I do - from the Levellers. It led him to break with his father and brothers and join Labour.
I was lucky enough, as an undergraduate, to listen to one of Michael Foot’s last great orations, when he spoke to a spell-bound Oxford Union about the iniquities of the EU. True heir to the English radical tradition, he had little time for “-isms” of any sort, and was one of the few Lefties of his generation never to have flirted with either Mussolini or Stalin. Although he was wrong about many things – his economic policy would have ruined us every bit as comprehensively as Gordon Brown’s wastrel clottishness – he got the big issues right, eschewing fascism, Communism and Euro-integrationism as intrinsically un-English doctrines.
At around that time, he was accused, outrageously, of having collaborated with the KGB. I remember, even as a student, becoming angry on his behalf: was there ever a politician less likely to betray his country? |
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