Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
famous book of the same period was actually the product of first-hand observation of Wigan Pier. John Vincent once commented in an Observer book review that ‘a man who describes as flabby Lancashire cheese which is crumbly gives himself away at once’.
Without doubt, Michael Foot’s compassionate heart and soul were deeply stirred by the poverty he saw in the dockside community and in Liverpool’s backstreets. It was a maritime city with a weak manufacturing base, and thus very high unemployment, painfully evident on street corners amidst its shabby terraces. Equally clearly, his speeches and articles while at Oxford show a young man moving rapidly leftwards in his revulsion for militarism and dictatorship. His criticisms of socialism in ‘Why I am a Liberal’ are half-hearted questionings of the merits of centralization. Most of his close friends at Oxford – John Cripps, Paul Reilly, Tony Greenwood – were emphatically Labour. And without doubt his acquaintance with Stafford Cripps and the bracing radical atmosphere of ‘Goodfellows’ were a powerful influence too. But, most characteristically, Michael’s conversion came through the medium of books – and indeed not sober works of socio-economic analysis, but imaginative works of fiction. While crawling to his office on Liverpool’s trams, his mind was focused not only on the slums through which he passed but on the books he read on his journey. Arnold Bennett was a particularly powerful stimulant: his How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) made a lasting impact on the young socialist. It is actually a short book, not at all one of Bennett’s masterpieces, but Foot no doubt appreciated the chapter on ‘Serious Reading’, which lavished great praise on Hazlitt’s essay ‘Poetry in General’ – ‘the best thing of its kind in English’.7 Foot also read extensively the novels of H. G. Wells, destined to loom alongside Cripps and Bevan as supreme inspirations. Tono-Bungay’s relatively brief account of socialist ideas was exciting to him, more perhaps for its subtle exposé of the immoralities of free-market competitive capitalism. Bernard Shaw was another important influence, though he was less favoured because of his criticisms of Wells’s Short History of the World.8 Foot’s was an undoctrinaire ethical socialism, a gospel of words and ideas, similar to that which had impelled young men like Attlee or Dalton into the Independent Labour Party. On more immediate matters, Foot was excited by Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom. Economic theory does not seem to have interested him. At first he was innocent of connections with Marxism, although by 1937 he was instructing the equally young Barbara Betts (the future Barbara Castle) in the intellectual delights of Das Kapital. His ideology, such as it was, kept its distance from the formal programmes of the Labour Party, still in 1935 trying to redefine its policies after the catastrophe of 1931 had laid bare the emptiness of its economic notions, and perhaps also the wider problem of attempting to modify and humanize a capitalist order which it ultimately wished to abolish.
Nor was Michael Foot a Fabian. He had met Beatrice Webb at Stafford Cripps’s home, and did not take to her admonitory style. He did not become a socialist in order to promote orderly administration by a bureaucratic elite; nor, without a background in local government at any level, was he inspired by the heady vision of ‘gas and water socialism’. The first book by the Webbs that he read, and indeed responded to positively, was their Industrial Democracy, which he read together with Barbara Betts at her Bloomsbury flat. Years later, in 1959, he took sharp issue with the Fabian historian Margaret Cole on the Webbs’ vision of socialism: ‘I think there is running through a great deal of what they wrote … a strong bureaucratic, anti-libertarian attitude which often reveals what I think is a real contempt for those who are engaged in Socialist agitation, protest and activities of that nature.’ He pointed out Beatrice’s patrician absence of interest in the great propaganda work of Robert Blatchford, editor of the early socialist newspaper the Clarion (he might have added her contempt for Keir Hardie and George Lansbury as well). For much of their career the Webbs were unconvinced that the Labour movement was the instrument of change, rather than a generally-defined ‘permeation’ and gradualism. Revealingly, Foot added as a criticism the Webbs’ uncritical adulation of the Soviet Union and Communist doctrine, in contrast to the far more critical approach of his old journalist friend and mentor H. N. Brailsford, historian and intellectual guru of the socialist left.9 Foot’s conclusions appear to endorse many of H. G. Wells’s assaults on the Fabian high command in the Edwardian period, and the general line of criticism indicated in one of his favourite books, The New Machiavelli. It was a battle of the books which Margaret Cole was most unlikely ever to win. For Foot, then, socialism was a greater liberalism, a doctrine of social and aesthetic liberation. It implied new values and a new society. It made Michael in time the natural disciple of the imaginative crusader Aneurin Bevan and the natural husband of the cultural socialist, Jill.
In this quest, Stafford Cripps seemed at this period the natural messiah. Since the 1931 schism, with the defection of MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden to become allies of the Tories, Cripps had led a sharp advance to the left. He preached a style of socialism that went far beyond the cautious parliamentary parameters within which Labour had grown up. He joined the far-left Socialist League, a movement of middle-class intellectuals, formed in 1932, in large part from the ILP when it disaffiliated from the Labour Party. It was a movement in which Michael Foot was shortly to enlist. Cripps campaigned to promote a new foreign policy in alliance with the Soviet Union: the League of Nations was dismissed as ‘the International Burglars’ Union’. He also pressed for the social ownership of all major industries and utilities, based not on state nationalization but on workers’ control. At the 1933 party conference Cripps proclaimed in Marxist terms that a socialist government would never receive fair treatment under capitalism, with the City, the Civil Service and the establishment all ranged against it. He called for some form of emergency government to entrench socialism in our time. In January 1934 he caused even greater alarm and shock by suggesting that Buckingham Palace would be foremost amongst the institutions seeking to defeat an incoming Labour government. This doctrine horrified leaders such as Dalton, Attlee and Morrison: Beatrice Webb thought him an extremist and his ideas revolutionary. By the 1935 general election Cripps’s erratic behaviour meant that his star was soon to wane. He himself recognized the fact by giving private financial help to Clem Attlee as assistant party leader in Lansbury’s last phase. But to the young Michael Foot, a books-driven evangelist yearning for a cause, Cripps was the most obvious instrument of creating a new socialist society.
Foot’s conversion to socialism was, naturally, a huge shock to his traditionally Liberal family. Nothing like it had ever happened at Pencrebar. What made things worse was that they discovered his conversion to Labour indirectly, when the Daily Herald picked up a short comment in the Oxford undergraduate magazine Isis. But the shock was far from terminal: it was nowhere near as bad as a Foot becoming a Tory (the family’s response to Dingle’s effective electoral pact with the Tories in Dundee is not recorded). Isaac was shaken at first by his son’s transformation. However, he cheerfully told Michael that if he was to move from liberalism to socialism, he ought to absorb the thoughts of a real radical. An even more intense perusal was needed of the thoughts of William Hazlitt (who, among other things, was a republican who voiced public grief on hearing of Napoleon’s deeply regrettable defeat at Waterloo).10 Even the Labour Party could be better understood by recourse to the bookshelves of Pencrebar. Michael’s mother Eva seems to have been more immediately upset by the news, and he had to write to her explaining his belief that only socialism, rather than any form of liberalism, had the answer to problems of poverty and peace. But in time his mother came to a more complete appreciation than Isaac ever did of the reasons for Michael’s becoming a socialist. Certainly her Labour son’s political advance was as important to her as that of any of her Liberal brood.
Michael Foot’s earliest activities as a left socialist in the streets of Liverpool had, of course, immediate social evils to condemn. But what is striking about his socialism, then and always, is how far this very English rebel, who travelled relatively little until his old age and was dedicated to worshipping the liberty tree of his country’s past, framed his socialism in an international context. This, of course, was common to many idealistic young people in the thirties, with the rise