Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
other leading Conservatives for their pre-war sympathies with Mussolini and Franco, along with right-wing monarchs like King George of the Hellenes. He declared that Britain enjoyed both a conception of political liberty denied to the Russians and a conception of economic liberty not shared by the Americans. This ‘unique combination of treasures’ gave it ‘the commanding position of leadership if we choose to exercise it’. He wound up with a passionate affirmation of the socialist patriotism common at the time:
At the end of this great war and after this great election, the British people can play as conspicuous a part before the gaze of all mankind as they played in 1940. Hitler has left behind his terrible legacies – racial hatred, love of violence, hunger, homelessness, famine and death. Surely it is the duty of our great country not to be content with some secondary role, but rather to seek the abatement of those evils by the assertion and example of a much more positive democracy. As we look out across this stricken Continent and as we see a new hope in the struggle to be born across this wilderness of shattered faiths, may it not be our destiny as the freest and most democratic and a socialist power to stand between the living and the dead and stay the flames?
The following speaker, the Conservative Ian Orr-Ewing, congratulated Foot in the customary fashion as ‘the sole survivor of a family which has been for many years represented in this House’. Back home, Father Isaac wrote with paternal pride: ‘Congratulations! I knew you could do it. When people have said you had not the [parliamentary] style I said to myself “Just you wait, my lads!” And now you’ve shown the beggars.’11 Journalists also gave Foot a good press. Even The Times gave him some prominence.12 The New Statesman commented that the speech and its reception showed that ‘the House still likes a first rate verbal pamphleteer’. Hannen Swaffer observed that Foot spoke ‘with the vehemence of a Hyde Park orator’, presumably meant as a compliment, while his colleague Tom Driberg, himself no great orator, wrote in the Sunday Express that Foot was ‘a little too platform but fiery and fluent’.13
He made another major speech that autumn, on one of his special themes, Germany – the destruction of its economy, the diminution of its boundaries, the impoverishment of its people. The leitmotiv was obviously the need not to repeat the errors of 1919. But what stamped him as one of the awkward squad of the parliamentary left was the famous vote against the terms of the American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes with much difficulty.14 There was criticism in Cabinet both of the reduced amount of the loan, $4 billion, and the commercial rate of interest attached to it. But most criticisms focused on two other aspects. They were both part of what Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky has shown was a calculated American attempt to undermine Britain’s financial predominance, with a dogmatic US insistence on free-market arrangements and scant regard for Britain’s post-war difficulties which Keynes called ‘an economic Dunkirk’. The first of these two provisions was an insistence on an immediate multilateral liberalization of trade; the second was that sterling should become freely convertible into dollars, this to take effect in July 1947. Emanuel Shinwell and Bevan had both fiercely attacked these proposals in Cabinet on 5 December, but had been rebuffed.15
In the Commons, over seventy Conservatives voted against the terms on 13 December: their most effective voice was Robert Boothby, later Michael Foot’s weekly sparring partner on television’s In the News, who called the loan ‘an economic Munich’. They were joined by twenty-three Labour rebels, nearly all on the soft left – Foot, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle, Benn Levy, Raymond Blackburn, W. G. Cove – along with some less likely rebels like Maurice Edelman and James Callaghan. Those on the furthest left like Konni Zilliacus, along with the two Communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, supported the government. Foot did not speak in the debate, but his general view emerged in Tribune.16 He saw the terms of the loan as reflecting the advice of defeatist economists about a huge balance of payments deficit looming in 1946, and a victory for ‘money power’ which would prevent the payment of sterling debts to India, Egypt, Palestine and other colonized powers. Foot had no expertise in international finance (and he was hostile to the Bretton Woods agreement for international currency stabilization concluded with the US in 1944), but he felt instinctively that the loan was part of a long-term American strategy to destroy British independence in foreign as well as economic policy. He told Dalton of his total opposition to convertibility. Hard-headed economic historians have in the main endorsed the general line of his instinctive criticisms. The catastrophic convertibility of sterling in July – August 1947 lasted barely a month.
The vote against the US loan (which the government won easily) confirmed Foot’s role as a critic. He spoke thereafter on domestic matters many times. On his home base, he dutifully paid due attention to the needs of Devonport and other dockyards, for all his frequent calls for cuts in arms spending. But he made most impact in the House on foreign policy issues. A central one throughout 1946–47 was the condition of Germany, made the more desperate by the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of German refugees from eastern Europe. Here his closest associate was his old publisher, Victor Gollancz, whose compassion was moved by the starvation amongst the German population. He and Foot spoke at a mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 26 November 1945 to raise awareness of the plight of German children. Other speakers were Labour’s Richard Stokes, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (who had almost won Newark for Labour in 1945), and Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Arthur Salter, both independents.17 Foot also came together with Gollancz and Stokes to form the Save Europe Now (SEN) campaign; Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins were amongst the other committee members, and Peggy Duff was secretary, so there was some overlap with CND later. Others prominent were Lord Lindsay, former Master of Balliol, and the Bishop of Chichester. The campaign went on for two years, attempting to persuade the government to encourage British citizens to either surrender some of their food coupons for the Germans or else send food parcels. SEN saw Foot at his most idealistic and far-sighted.18
In the House, he described how ‘something like famine’ prevailed in Germany, where food rations had fallen from the starvation level of 1,500 calories per day to as low as seven hundred. His solution for finding the relevant resources was to cease to pay for large occupying forces in Germany, and to make further arms reductions in the Middle and Far East. He pleaded for a discussion of the principles underlying British foreign policy. One ray of light was the compassionate, if short-lived, policy for social reconstruction of Lord Pakenham as Minister for Germany after 1945, which Foot saw as a kind of anticipation of the Marshall Plan. Foot’s view of the German problem was a comprehensive one. He urged the need for a political reconstruction with decentralized institutions, but also warned of the long-term dangers of Germany’s being divided into eastern and western zones. He warned against ‘an anti-German mania’ like the lunatic plan devised during the war by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office for Germany to be reduced to a purely pastoral economy. On the other hand, like other British socialists he found it hard to make common cause with his comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, since their leader, Kurt Schumacher, demanded early German reunification and spoke in alarmingly nationalist terms, with frequent use of the word Reich. Not until 1949, with the impact of the Marshall Plan on its economy and a stable constitution, did West Germany progress, albeit under the long-term rule of Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Christian Democrats, and not under the still notionally Marxist SDP.
An even stronger concern in Foot’s Commons speeches was the growing violence and political disintegration in Palestine. By 1946 the region was in near chaos. There was unending tension between Jews and Arabs; a mounting exodus of Jews to Palestine after the Holocaust, with US support, despite determined efforts by Bevin and the British government to prevent it; and open guerrilla warfare by Jewish paramilitary or terrorist groups, the Haganah and Irgun Zvei Leumi, against the British forces stationed in Palestine. They were reinforced by the violent Stern Gang. The destruction