Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
more socialist planning in domestic policies, but what caught the imagination were the criticisms of foreign and defence policy, its call for Britain to stand aloof from confrontations between America and Russia, to withdraw its troops worldwide, and to demobilize rather than embark on conscription. Some of this was the work of Crossman, especially a chapter on ‘The Job Abroad’ and passages on international affairs more generally. But another key author was Michael Foot, whose contribution focused on the domestic economic scene, notably ‘socialist planning’ and tighter controls on capital and labour. With his other outlets in the press, he was typecast as a symbol of Keep Left from then on.
Foot’s viewpoint was an amalgam of socialism, patriotism and anti-militarism. Britain’s international role would be the product of the success of its socialist achievement at home. It would offer moral leadership. Foot’s answer to the problems of the world was a third force in which democratic socialist Britain would join with comrades in western Europe. Bevan had called for one during the war. It would stand apart equally from the military adventures of both the United States and the Soviet Union: ‘The cause of British socialism and the cause of British independence and the cause of world sanity are indissolubly bound together.’26 The extent to which Foot was identified with a version of a federal united Europe at this time is worth underlining. The later defender of British parliamentary sovereignty against the encroachments of Brussels was in 1946–48 advocating ‘a United States of Europe’. It would build a customs union, and plan the coordination of heavy industries. Most of all, it would conduct its own foreign policy and support the Third World with development programmes, bulk commodity purchase and fair trade.
Foot was never a European federalist to the same degree as Kim Mackay, who was influenced by the constitutional arrangements of his native Australia. He cherished Parliament too much. His vision of western Europe was as a socialist-led Europe: the voice he usually quoted as representative of Continental Europe was the veteran French socialist leader Léon Blum. Along with Crossman, Mikardo and others on the left, Foot continued to champion European unity in this form – even though a major difficulty now was that the left in both France and Italy was preponderantly Communist. In May 1948 he was amongst those disciplined by Transport House for attending the founding conference for the Council of Europe at The Hague, where the main event was a visionary speech by Winston Churchill. A ‘Europe Group’ was formed amongst Labour MPs on 2 December 1946, with Kim Mackay as its chairman. Foot was amongst those, including Crossman, Mikardo, George Wigg and Barbara Castle, who joined in a second wave a few weeks later.27 It conducted discussions on policy with the French and other socialist parties, and remained active until late 1949.
And yet, the impact of Keep Left was short-lived. At the Margate conference the government produced its own counter-pamphlet, Cards on the Table (actually written by Denis Healey of Transport House’s international department). Ernest Bevin crushed his miscellaneous critics with an overwhelming conference speech in which he famously condemned the ‘stab in the back’ and the disloyalty of the Crossman amendment. Its author became widely known as ‘double Crossman’ from then on. In Tribune Foot was sceptical about Bevin’s easy rhetorical triumph, and critical of the ‘listlessness, almost indifference’ of the debates on international affairs.28 He listed key unanswered questions, notably ‘What role are we to play as the foremost European power?’
But in fact it was events which finally undermined the socialist federal argument of Keep Left. Soon after party conference, the US Secretary of State George Marshall announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, his proposals initially covering the Soviet Union as well. Soon the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was working out schemes for the mobilization and distribution of aid in western Europe, to the huge advantage of the ailing British economy. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union became more and indefensible for a democratic socialist like Foot. He became a champion of anti-Communist dissidents in eastern Europe. He particularly admired Milovan Djilas’s work of political theory The New Class (1957), and the Montenegrin intellectual was to be a guest in the Foots’ Hampstead home on several occasions later. In April 1948 Foot argued strongly against the telegram sent to Pietro Nenni, signed initially by thirty-seven Labour MPs (fifteen of whom subsequently disavowed supporting it), backing his left-wing Italian Socialist Party, rather than the right-wing Saragat socialist grouping. Foot, never considered as a possible signatory on any of the lists of possible supporters, wrote in Tribune that the Nenni telegram was ‘an act of sabotage against the declared policy of the party’, and gave the impression that a large section of the Labour Party would welcome a Communist victory at the polls in Italy. Both as a libertarian and an admirer of Silone, Foot could never endorse such a policy. A hysterical letter of protest from the near-Communist Tom Braddock was ignored.29 Other key events in 1948 which reinforced Foot’s anti-Communism were successively the ‘coup’ in February which put Czechoslovakia under Soviet control, the schism with Tito in Yugoslavia (whom Foot solidly defended until his imprisonment of Djilas alienated him from the government of Belgrade) and, most decisively, the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948–49: this last led even Aneurin Bevan to propose that Britain should send in tanks through the Soviet zone to bring in essential supplies. Foot in Tribune and in Parliament symbolized the new mood. He was particularly moved by events in Czechoslovakia; he had Czech socialist friends, and went with Crossman and Wigg on a mission to the country just after the Communist coup. In November 1948 Foot warmly applauded the election of Harry Truman as US President: he had no sympathy for the fellow-travelling left-wing challenge of Henry Wallace.30 The creation of NATO, largely under Bevin’s aegis, in the spring of 1949 was as warmly applauded by Foot in Tribune as by the party mainstream, and he publicly rebuked Mikardo for opposing it.31 ‘The Futility of Mr Priestley’ ridiculed a future comrade in CND for regarding the USA and the Soviet Union as equally anti-democratic.
Many of the criticisms of Bevin’s foreign policy from Foot and others were cogent and well-informed. But they are mainly important as anticipations of the later Bevanites. In the 1940s they struck many of the right notes at the wrong time. It was difficult to suggest an alternative foreign policy at a time when Stalin seemed so threatening and so obdurate. The era of post-Stalin ‘peaceful existence’ lay many years off. A socialist-led federal Europe was never more than a pipe-dream; the ‘western union’ which Britain did lead into being in the Brussels Treaty of March 1948 was limited and functional, geared heavily to defence issues, and in no sense a ‘third force’.
These events left Michael Foot with a sense of frustration. Bevin’s foreign policy showed ‘a clean sheet of failure’, yet there seemed no viable alternative. In practice, like his friends and colleagues Koestler and Orwell he trod the path of a regretful but firm anti-Communism. The Keep Left group re-formed (without Foot) in July 1949, and drew on the expertise of Oxford economists such as Thomas Balogh and David Worswick in producing the pamphlet Keeping Left, which twelve Labour MPs signed. But Keep Left had lost impetus, and tended to fragment. It was a highly miscellaneous group at the best of times. The effect of all this on the career of Michael Foot was mixed: because of his greater prominence and articulacy, involvement with the left tended to heighten suspicion of him in the party as irresponsible or disloyal. Some comrades did not like him anyway. Hugh Gaitskell, his later nemesis, writing after the Durham miners’ gala in August 1948, found Foot ‘rather strange. He never seems to talk except when making speeches, and was most silent and reserved all the time.’ Jennie Lee, he added, was ‘a very stupid woman’.32
And yet there is much to Foot’s credit. On both Germany and Palestine he voiced an unpopular cause with a blend of idealism and hard fact. On the origins of the Cold War, without lapsing into what Marx called ‘infantile leftism’, he raised perfectly proper questions about the robotic confrontation into which Bevin was dragged at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in 1946–47. In questioning Soviet foreign policy, the extent to which it posed a military