From the Guilty Men pamphlet in 1940, to his biographies of HG Wells, Byron, and Bevan, to his polemic against nuclear weapons Dr Strangelove I Presume, to his collections of essays, to his memoir of the 1983 election; he wrote eclectically, lucidly, persuasively, and with verve and style. This week’s column is given over to a small selection of some of my favourite examples of his work. As we face the biggest fight of our lives, perhaps we can glean some inspiration from Michael Foot’s literary brilliance.
‘Pamphleteering is a forgotten weapon, yet once it was perhaps the most potent in English politics. A pamphlet by Swift broke the Duke of Marlborough… The weapon has now been drawn from its scabbard with a vengeance. Guilty Men, written by a mysterious and bashful Cato (Gollancz, 8/6) promises to become the most sensational political publication of the war. It is a searing, savage, but documented attack on the men responsible for the failure to provide Britain with the armaments to fight this war. It is an amazing indication of the foresight of the present Prime Minister and it pays full tribute to the men who have intensified the war effort in recent months. The story is told by one who appears to have watched the drama from the floor of the House of Commons itself.’
Review of his own anonymously-published Guilty Men in the Evening Standard (1940)
‘Aneurin Bevan, I believe, did more than any other man of his time to keep alive democratic socialism as the most adventurous, ambitious, intelligent, civilised, and truly liberal of modern doctrines. This, the triumph of his whole life and personality, was the greatest of his achievements. He wanted a Labour Party seriously determined to change society to its foundations and a Britain sufficiently independent and sceptical of all the clichés of the Cold War to guide and lead the nations to a genuine peace. These were the kind of causes which he served more eloquently, more subtly, more faithfully and, we must add, in view of the long hostility he encountered and surmounted, more courageously than any other British citizen of his time.’
Obituary of Aneurin Bevan in Tribune (1960)
‘He knew what self-serving crawlers politicians could be, but he knew too that politics was concerned with the great question of rich and poor. He saw how human nature could be rootedly conservative yet he saw too how common decency so often required that it should be convulsively revolutionary. He served human liberty. That was his secular boast. He did, and still does.’
On Jonathan Swift, in Debts of Honour (1980)
‘The profound immorality of the Thatcherite society will be exposed year by year as the economic crisis of the 1980s deepens. The interval between slumps will grow briefer, as they have done already in the past decade. The clash between rich and poor will become sharper and less easily masked. The condemnation of greater stretches of our country to industrial dereliction and social degradation will grow more widespread and intolerable. Our precious earth will grow more polluted. Britain will cease to be a great industrial nation, although the world will still need the ships, the steel, the manufactures, the coal which our treacherous allegiance to market theories have destroyed. We will have squandered the national boon of North Sea oil…and we will have gained nothing in the process but the contempt of other nations so much less favoured than ourselves.’
Another Heart and Other Pulses (1983)
‘These peaceful possibilities and achievements – George Orwell saw this comparative gentleness almost as part of the English character – need to be stressed all the more since in modern times, even after genuine democratic institutions have been established, the right to settle matters at the ballot box instead of by fighting is occasionally derided or despised. A kind of bastard Marxism or Trotskyism has sought to spread the doctrine that since all capitalist states by definition repressive, any form of resistance is equally legitimate. Neither Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky, we must hastily add, ever said anything so demonstrably and dangerously foolish. Indeed Marx and Engels learnt more from the Chartists than the Chartists learnt from them. They sensed some of the potentialities of real democracy long before Britain could be called a democracy or anything like it.’
Preface to Loyalists and Loners (1986)