Paul Foot

Paul Foot (8 November 1937 – 18 July 2004) was an English journalist and socialist. He was the son of Lord Caradon and the nephew of Michael Foot.

• Marx argued that all human history was dominated by a tussle for the wealth between classes, one of which took the wealth, and used it to exploit the others. As science and technology developed, so one exploiting class was replaced by another that used the resources of society more efficiently. The necessity for exploitation, he observed, had ended with capitalism. If the working class, the masses who cooperate to produce the wealth, could seize the means of production from the capitalist class, they could put an end to exploitation forever and run society on the lines of the famous slogan: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’
  • Chapter 1

• Socialist society can only come about by a revolution; if the masses, through general strikes and mass agitation, seize the means of production from their present owners.

  ‘But doesn’t that involve violence? Surely you’re not prepared to use violence to achieve your political ends?’

  This cry is always flung in the face of revolutionaries, usually by people who are only too prepared to accept without complaint the recurring and brutalising violence of the class society in which we live. It comes from people who ignored or supported the orgy of destruction which the government of America launched for more than a full decade against the people of Vietnam; from people who offer sympathy and succour to the regime of the Shah of Persia, which is founded on the torture of dissenters; of from people who hardly raise a word of protest about the deep violence of tyrannical governments all over the world – from Thailand, to South Africa to South Korea; or from people who never turn a hair at the institutionalised violence of everyday life – of people being maimed and battered in factories and building sites through negligence and greed of employers; of old people tormented by hunger and cold.

  • Chapter 4

• Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people.
  • Chapter 8

• [On Foot's housemaster at Shrewsbury School (1952–1955)] Trench made his name as a great innovator, especially in corporal punishment. He would select certain younger boys for special tuition in Greek prose, in which he was a recognised scholar. Less than three mistakes and a bar of chocolate; more than three a beating. But Trench was no ordinary flogger. He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn't. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant's trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt. He achieved the rare distinction of being hated and despised by every boy who came in contact with him, and was therefore an obvious choice to be the youngest ever headmaster of Bradfield, and then of Eton.
  At Eton he made the mistake of whipping the heirs of earls as though they were run-of-the-mill manufacturers' sons at Shrewsbury or Bradfield. One sensitive young viscount limped home and bared his tattered bum to his outraged father. Trench was sacked. He was appointed headmaster of Fettes.
  • Originally published in the New Statesman (["London's Diary", 13] July 1979), reprinted as "No Ordinary Flogger"' in Words as Weapons: Selected Writings, 1980–1990, London: Verso (1990), p. 218
  • Anthony Chenevix-Trench had died the previous month. Foot had first written about Chevenix-Trench in 1969 for Private Eye and wrote about him again in "Diary: The Buttocks Problem" for the London Review of Books 18:17 (5 September 1996) after the publication of a biography.

• I'd been impressed, too, more than I dared admit at the campaign by Tony Benn and his supporters. Why, I wonder? I'd never been an admirer of him personally. I suppose I've bashed him in print just as much as anyone else in the country, even the Daily Mirror leader writers. It wasn't even that I was specially keen on the specific policies he was advocating. As you know, I don't much go for a 'siege economy' and import controls, which I regard as a lot of nationalist claptrap. And I certainly didn't like all those eulogies about Russia which were starting to creep into Tony Benn's speeches, and which reminded me of the sort of windy fellow-travelling which polluted the Left in the 1940s and 1950s.
  I suppose what I liked was the straight appeal to socialist solutions – the open attack on capitalism and all its works.
  • "[Dear Comrade,] Three letters to a Bennite: 1. New Year’s Eve, 1981", Socialist Workers Party pamphlet (March 1982) reprinted on marxists.org

• Change does not just happen, and it certainly doesn't just come because one day Tony Benn might be prime minister at the head of a left-wing Labour government. It comes when people fight for it. And that is why we, with our four thousand members and a fighting newspaper, are more optimistic and confident than you with your quarter of a million paper members, with your resolutions, intrigues, doubts and dilemmas.
  How much more confident and optimistic we would both be if we were members of the same organisation.
  And remember, it is no good appealing to me to join the Labour Party. I would not be let in. My application alone would probably cost you a dozen more defections from the Parliamentary Labour Party to the SDP and another couple of points drop in the opinion polls.
  No, I'm afraid there is only one possible way in which we can now come together: for you to come to us.
  • "[Dear Comrade,] Three letters to a Bennite: 3. 12 January 1982", Socialist Workers Party pamphlet (March 1982) reprinted on marxists.org
  • The voter turnout at the 1979 general election was 31,221,362 (76%). Those registered on the electoral roll for the UK at the time amounted to 41,095,649 potential voters.

• There appears to be a link between the enormity of a crime and the ignominy which attaches to any journalist or investigator who publicly questions the guilt of those convicted for it. This has been especially true in the case of Irish people convicted of bombings in Britain. Anyone who questions the verdict against an Irish bomber is assumed to be a bomber himself. As a result of this extraordinary logic, the authorities have been able to get away with mistakes, inconsistencies and far worse.
  • "The Card-Players", London Review of Books 8:16 (18 September 1986)
  • From a review of Chris Mullin's Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings (Chatto, 1986). See Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974.

• I am sorry to read in this book that Ian Botham is an 'independent Tory' and (worse) that he admires Mrs Thatcher. But I am not inclined to mix politics with sport. Indeed, the worst damage done to cricket since the war has been that mixing of politics with sport which knocked South Africa out of international cricket. The supporters of apartheid mixed politics with sport so shamefully that they banned people from playing cricket with one another because of the colour of their skin. This outrage, which brought the entire sport into disrepute, was greeted with unconcern by the same MCC gentlemen who have apoplexy when cricketers say they smoked pot when they were kids. Racialism is a million times more damaging to cricket than cannabis. Where does Ian Botham stand on that?
  He was offered, literally, a million pounds if he and his friend Viv Richards went to South Africa as part of the public relations circus for that country’s racialist politics. He refused point blank.
  • "Come here, Botham", London Review of Books 8:17 (9 October 1986)
  • From a review of Frank Keating's High, Wide and Handsome. Ian Botham: The Story of a Very Special Year (Collins, 1986). Botham had been suspended during the 1986 season after admitting he had smoked cannabis.

• Which is the more subversive: a group of senior people in the security services who are giving secrets to the enemy, or a group of senior people in the security services who are working systematically to bring down the elected government here? The question would worry most democrats, but for the authors of books about the security services it is no worry at all. To a man, they are absorbed with the first danger. The second danger, they protest, does not exist. Or rather, if it does exist, it is best not to mention it.
  • "An Enemy Within", London Review of Books, 9:8 (23 April 1987)
  • From a review of Nigel West's Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Mole in MI5 (Weidenfeld, 1987).

• It is not Neil Kinnock's fault that he is unconvincing. He is unconvincing because he represents a formula for changing society which has been proved, over sixty years more, to have failed in its central purpose. Compare Kinnock in any age to [Clement] Attlee in any age, and on every conceivable count Kinnock is the more impressive. Attlee, for all the ridiculous hero-worship of history, was really a mean-minded bore, whose only political quality was cunning. He had none of Kinnock’s passion, none of his oratory, none of his charisma. But Attlee (and Wilson, in the same sort of way, with the same sort of qualities) won elections while Kinnock loses them. The difference is not in the quality of the men, but in the huge history of failure with which Kinnock – but not Attlee, and Wilson rather less – has had to wrestle.
  • "Disaster Woman", London Review of Books 10:1 (7 January 1988).

• [On George Kennedy Young, a former deputy head of MI6, and (later a) merchant banker] The intellectual integrity which he guarded most assiduously was that of the Far Right. He was a racialist to his very core. He detested black people, whose immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the postwar Tory Party was riddled with treacherous moderates, crypto-Communists and homosexuals. He spent many years fighting in the Tory Party for a leadership which stood up for the Old Order he believed in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the [previously cited] memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy.
  • "So what if he was", London Review of Books 12:20 (25 October 1990)
  • From a review of George Blake's No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990) and Anthony Cavendish's Inside Intelligence (Collins, 1990).

• [Michael] Crick cannot discover whether Archer really believes in God. The evidence of his book, however, is heavily weighted against God's existence. Any omnipotent deity with a grain of mercy would surely have preserved us from Jeffrey Archer.
  • "Those Suits", London Review of Books 17:17 (7 September 1995).

• Add to these anecdotes and quotations [Andrew] Neil's writing style, which is dour and monotonous, that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke nor a sign that the greatest young journalist of his generation ever enjoyed a single book he didn't serialise, and you might conclude that Full Disclosure should be consigned to everlasting fire. You would be quite wrong. The book is thoroughly absorbing. It is a dark tragedy the chief fascination of which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all.
  • "Dashing for Freedom", London Review of Books 18:24 (12 December 1996)
  • In Andrew Neil's Full Disclosure (Macmillan), Alastair Burnet in early 1983 is recorded as recommending Neil to Rupert Murdoch ("go for the best young journalist of his generation") as the next editor of The Sunday Times.

• All the gifts which providence had showered on Jonathan Aitken were devoted to pimping for the billionaires from Riyadh.
  • "Prince and Pimp", London Review of Books 20:1 (1 January 1998)

• The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. ... In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists.
  Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi.
  As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I'd never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear.
  • "Tony Cliff", The Guardian (11 April 2000)
  • Cliff had died two days earlier. Also see History of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain).

• Shelley wrote that some atrocity on the part of the wealthy set "the blood boiling in indignation in my veins". Ever since I first read that, I've subjected any new political analysis to a BBIV (blood boiling in veins) test. Do these two books pass? The unequivocal answer in both cases is 'yes'. The blood boils all right, both at the corporate exploiters and the politicians who dance to their tune.
  • "Blood Boiling", London Review of Books 23:4 (22 February 2001)
  • From a review of Naomi Klein's No Logo (Flamingo, 2001) and George Monbiot's Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (Macmillan, 2000).

• Who says history doesn't repeat itself? Twenty-seven years ago, in 1977, a Birmingham Labour MP, Roy Jenkins, scuttled off to a well-paid job in Europe, and resigned his seat. The Labour candidate who lost the subsequent byelection was Terry Davies. He later won the seat but is now scuttling off to a well-paid job in Europe, causing another byelection. And there the historical repetition ends. I was the Socialist Workers party candidate in that 1977 byelection, and came bottom of the poll with 0.8 per cent of the vote. My friend John Rees, who is standing there now for the Respect coalition, promises me he will do better.
  • "Rewarded for failure", The Guardian (7 July 2004)
  • This was the concluding paragraph of Paul Foot's last Guardian article. John Rees gained 6.3% of the vote in the byelection. Rees stood in Birmingham Hodge Hill, created in 1983 after boundary changes, whereas Jenkins' constituency was Birmingham Stechford, from which the new seat was formed.

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