Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
Only Crossman attempted to write a statement of political philosophy. Their socialism came across most clearly in their view of foreign policy. Most of them were middle-class journalists: trade unionists (other than members of the NUJ) were very rare. Until the growth of unrest over the anti-Soviet drift of Bevin’s foreign policy the following spring, they were little more than just kindred souls, closet critics in the tea room and the bar. They all favoured strongly socialist policies at home, which meant planning, controls and an uncompromising programme of public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. But in its first two years, the government itself seemed to pursue this policy with such zest that there was little to complain about. It was really in the more difficult period of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ in 1948–50, when the nationalizations effectively came to an end, that complaints arose. Nor did Commonwealth or colonial policy generate any great dissent. The left could justify everything, from the transfer of power in India to an unsuccessful attempt to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika. The major areas of criticism almost entirely involved foreign relations, and were largely offshoots of the early stages of the Cold War. To this should be added concern over Palestine, since almost all of them were passionately pro-Jewish and totally opposed to Bevin’s policy.
The members of the group were all instinctively oppositionists. Not one was seriously considered for government office, nor did they expect (or perhaps want) to be. Men like Mikardo or Driberg had backbench mindsets then and always. Until Bevan’s resignation as Minister of Health in April 1951, their influence upon either government or party policy was minimal, and in inverse proportion to their prominence as journalists. To call them ‘Labour’s Conscience’, as one text has done, seems remarkably inflated.4 Foot himself, a highly individual journalist with a past record of campaigns for the Socialist League and employment by Lord Beaverbrook, was considered unreliable, a gadfly, a meteor, the ultimate symbol of a party of protest, not a party of power. His activity was largely focused outside Parliament. The prospect of front-bench status seemed at this stage quite bizarre.
These Labour MPs were soft left, but no more than that. With the possible exception of Geoffrey Bing, a barrister later to be Kwame Nkrumah’s Attorney-General in Ghana, they all felt themselves to be located within the capacious reaches of the party’s broad church – only just, in some cases. They were quite distinct from a much smaller, more extreme group – D. N. Pritt, John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson (all later to be expelled from the party), along with William Warbey, Tom Braddock and Ronald Chamberlain. The French political commentator Bertrand de Jouvenel distinguished in 1949 between what he curiously called ‘the pacifist head’ of Cross-man and ‘the Russophil head’ of Zilliacus.5 These hard-left dissentients, consistently pro-Soviet and anti-American, were scarcely within the Labour tabernacle at all. They tended to keep their own counsel. Their role in the party was minute, though they could sometimes ally with Foot’s friends, as in the famous ‘stab in the back’ motion on foreign affairs in November 1946 (see page 121). They might be joined also by virtual pacifists like Rhys Davies or Reg Sorensen. But Foot’s friends were more in the mainstream. Foot himself, like Crossman, had always been anti-Stalinist. He never took the sentimental view that ‘left could speak to left’. From 1948 his attitude towards the Soviet Union hardened, as did that of Bevan. Foot and Crossman were foremost among those inspired by the anti-Communist thrust of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, not to mention those famous tracts against totalitarianism, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, written by the eminent recent Tribune columnist George Orwell. However blurred the boundaries might be on the more sectarian left of the parliamentary Labour Party, a fundamental divide between the future Bevanites and Tribunites, and the fellow-travelling fringe, was always apparent. With the two Communist MPs, William Gallacher and Philip Piratin, Foot had almost nothing to do, although he retained his admiration for Harry Pollitt, whom he considered a more considerable politician. He always felt that Pollitt’s return to Parliament for Rhondda West in 1945 (the Labour candidate, Mainwaring, beat him by just 972 votes) would have been politically valuable.
Foot’s contacts and manoeuvres in the new House were always with other backbenchers. His links with government ministers were mostly tenuous. He had scant enthusiasm for either Attlee or the Lord President Herbert Morrison, and clearly underestimated them both. The former he regarded as colourless and uninspired, and a wartime advocate of coalitionism; Morrison he saw as just a machine man, who wanted to curb backbenchers’ independence – unfairly so, since Morrison had shown much interest in ideas and policy-making before the war. For Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, Foot began with a higher regard. Relations were sufficiently good for Bevin to ask him to go on a fact-finding mission to Persia (Iran) in February 1946. The purpose was to assess Russian infiltration in that country, from which Russian and British troops were due to withdraw on 2 March (in fact the British had already left). There was also anxiety that the Russians were taking root in Persian Azerbaijan, through the Tudeh party. Foot’s colleague was a Conservative ex-brigadier, Anthony Head, which led to predictable jokes about ‘Head and Foot’, and they had extensive talks with Tudeh leaders. Foot was convinced after this visit that there was abundant evidence for Soviet Russia’s intended domination of Iran. He also wrote in the Daily Herald in somewhat prophetic terms about the dangers to Anglo-American oil, including the refinery at Abadan, and made many sensible suggestions about changing the relationship between the British heirs of imperialism and the Persian authorities. But Bevin took little interest, and nothing tangible resulted from what was Foot’s one and only official activity on behalf of a British government until 1974.6 But by the end of 1946, Bevin’s robust confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, and even more his blatantly anti-Jewish policy in Palestine, had earned him Foot’s anathema.
Nor was Foot in any sense a protégé of Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and patron of youth, as were centre-right figures like Gaitskell and Callaghan, along with Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey (neither yet an MP), to whom was added for a time Barbara Castle. In one rare exchange, Dalton wrote to rebuke Foot over factual inaccuracies in Tribune over the convertibility of sterling, with particular reference to the precise roles as advisers of Otto Niemeyer, Lord Catto and Wilfred Eady. Foot replied courteously, although he pressed the need for the Treasury to employ ‘more socialist economists’ to assist in ‘carrying out a Socialist policy’.7 The only one of the government’s big five with whom he had ever been close was, of course, Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade and eventually Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had shed his links with Tribune and they seldom saw each other now. Cripps replied to a query from Foot about the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 in purely formal terms.8
Foot was close to no other minister, with the obvious and seminal exception of Aneurin Bevan. With Foot working closely with Jennie Lee on the editorial board of Tribune, he served as a permanent socialist sounding-board for Labour’s Minister of Health as he pushed through the National Health Service. Their relationship became closer still after 1949, as Bevan found himself increasingly at odds with the drift of foreign and defence policy. Indeed, Foot, while increasingly critical of Attlee’s government, found his special relationship with Bevan made this one aspect of his parliamentary role rewarding, as he pressed Bevan to challenge government policy. Jennie Lee by contrast found the entire experience between 1945 and 1951 frustrating and depressing.9
Foot later felt his speeches in the 1945–51 Parliament fell short of the highest standard. They were too complicated in structure, and perhaps too rhetorical. Sometimes the Oxford Union debates did not seem far away. He sounded more like a journalist in Parliament than a parliamentarian; his father was later to express concern on this point. But he began splendidly. His maiden speech, focusing on foreign policy, on 20 August 1945, was a clear success.10 He complimented the King’s Speech in characteristic terms: ‘Oliver Cromwell could have hardly done a better job himself in