Michael Foot: A Life

As a pillar of the Palestine Committee, Michael Foot was among those who hoped that a potentially pro-Jewish Labour government would begin a new departure after the long saga of bitterness following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But he was to be horrified by Bevin’s policy. Britain’s refusal to grant more than a minimum number of immigration visas (a mere 1,500 a month at first), the inhumane efforts to prevent the sailing of the Exodus in 1946 with its refugees from the prison camps, the refusal to contemplate a Jewish state, worst of all what seemed to be the blatant anti-Semitism of the British Foreign Office, caused immense shock. Foot’s zeal for a state of Israel was reinforced by his renewal of contact with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that Foot was now ‘very anti-Bolshie’; Foot helped Koestler by pressing the Home Office to speed up a visa for his aged Hungarian mother. He wrote frequently on Palestine in Tribune, and denounced Bevin for not admitting 100,000 Jewish displaced persons into Palestine immediately. Another strong influence was his new friend Richard Crossman. Previously pro-Arab and, by his own confession, anti-Semitic, Crossman’s membership of an Anglo-American committee of inquiry into Palestine turned him into a fervent Zionist. It urged an immediate agreement to certificates for 100,000 Jewish immigrants: Bevin treated this with contempt, and in effect sought to continue the pre-war policy towards the Jews.

The names of Crossman and Foot were attached to a particularly effective thirty-two-page pamphlet for Gollancz in the autumn of 1946, A Palestine Munich?. In fact much of it, including the entire first section, was written by Arthur Koestler.19 It detailed the restrictive immigration policy up to 1939 and the rise of Jewish and Arab resistance. The 1939 White Paper, calling for a future Arab Federation in Palestine with highly restricted Jewish immigration, was dismissed as a bribe to the Arabs to prevent their sympathizing with Germany. The pamphlet called for the government to allow full immigration of Jews up to the limit of Palestine’s capacity to absorb them, and not to use force of arms to endorse what Labour ministers themselves had called a Palestine Munich. A promise of early independence to the Palestinian Arabs would mean ‘an Anglo – Jewish war’. The booklet’s political solution, in the absence of one being suggested from the Foreign Office, was a partitioned Palestine free of American military involvement, consisting of a ‘Judean state’ based on large-scale immigration, and an Arab state, with the central mountain region transferred to the Kingdom of Transjordan. At this point Britain would withdraw its forces, and self-interest would compel both the new Jewish and Arab states to collaborate and to come to terms with each other. It was the most cogent statement by pro-Jewish Labour representatives yet written, and it was predictably dismissed out of hand by all Arab representatives. Basically, it reflected Koestler’s totally one-sided Jewish sympathies (he wrote in support of the Stern Gang’s operations), and got nowhere. As it happened, Koestler greatly disliked Israel when he moved there, quarrelled with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and old friends like Teddy Kollek, and rapidly returned to Britain amidst acrimony all round.20

Through Tribune, and to a far lesser extent through his Daily Herald column (which usually was safely loyalist), Foot kept up his campaign on behalf of the Jews in 1947–48. The British government, in which the Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones was given the poisoned chalice of Palestine, offered no way forward. Creech-Jones’s partition proposals collapsed; Bevin’s proposal for five more years of British trusteeship offered nothing new; the United Nations came out with a scheme for immediate partition which Bevin promptly rejected. In the end the British government, harassed by the huge support costs of maintaining troops in Palestine, decided simply to pull its forces out, and withdrew them by 15 May 1948. Attlee quoted the precedent of the withdrawal from India. But there the British government had produced an agreed scheme for a political settlement that would follow. In Palestine there was none. The Foreign Office imagined that the various Arab armies would simply drive the Jews into the sea. The successful creation of the state of Israel in 1949 astonished everybody. Foot, of course, was delighted that a Jewish state had come into being against the odds. In an adjournment debate on 12 August 1947 he had called for the early withdrawal of British forces. The British people themselves were delighted to see their troops withdrawn from a violent land, but it was impossible to see the Palestine settlement as anything other than a shambles and a catastrophe. Foot might hope that the Jewish people would enter a more settled phase after August 1948. In fact, their tragedy was to haunt him and the world for the remainder of his life.

His main concern in Tribune columns and Commons speeches, though, was the deepening crisis in relations with Russia. Throughout 1946, especially in Germany, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the atmosphere seemed ever darker. Of all the commentators on the left, Michael Foot was one of the most outspoken in denouncing Russian policy in eastern Europe after the war. In the press he condemned Russia’s intimidation of the socialists in Poland, its pressure upon Yugoslavia, its totalitarian control of eastern Germany.21 Beyond Europe, his visit to Iran had convinced him of Russian dreams of domination in the Middle East as well. On the other hand, he shared the anxiety common on the left at the drift towards a full-scale military alliance with the United States. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March terrified him. Dissatisfaction with Bevin’s policy built up amongst Labour MPs in 1946, and finally spilled over, with a critical letter sent to Attlee on 29 October by a group of twenty-one Labour backbenchers urging that a democratic socialist Britain ought to pursue a genuine ‘middle way’ between American ‘free enterprise’ and Russian totalitarianism. They were far from being a far-left caucus; they included Crossman, Foot, Levy and Silverman, but also Callaghan and Woodrow Wyatt. A few days later Crossman circulated an amendment to the Address which urged ‘full Socialist planning and control’ of the world’s resources, and ‘a democratic and constructive Socialist alternative to the otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet Communism’. In the end, forty-three Labour MPs put their names to it; among them, in addition to Crossman, were Levy, Silverman and Michael Foot. The name of Jennie Lee, Bevan’s wife, indicated that at least one Cabinet minister was unhappy too.22

Crossman moved his amendment on 18 November 1946, though he lessened its impact from the start by saying he would not call a division.23 In sharp terms, he asked the government to reject proposals for an Anglo – American military alliance, and asked whether precise arrangements in terms of arms sharing and staff discussions were already under way. Since Bevin was away in New York, Attlee himself replied, mildly criticizing Crossman’s speech as totally one-sided. Two Scottish ILP members mischievously moved Crossman’s amendment to a vote, and the government won by 353 to 0, with several Labour abstentions, including Foot. But left-wing anxiety about British foreign policy moved onto a new stage two months later when the ‘Truman doctrine’ for US military aid to potential victims of Soviet aggression resulted in new American military involvement in Greece and Turkey. Talks at the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York had effectively broken down. Talk of a Cold War, an iron curtain and even a possible third world war became commonplace.

Michael Foot had taken little part in the Crossman amendment debate, and indeed had been under fire himself from the left for being too anti-Soviet in Tribune. He remained so in the Daily Herald, and satirized Molotov’s plans for ‘European confusion’.24 But he also now became a leader of the most significant protest against government policy since the general election. Some left-wing MPs now began to meet regularly to prepare plans: led by Crossman, Foot and Mikardo, they also included Stephen Swingler, Harold Davies, Mallalieu, Benn Levy, Kim Mackay and Woodrow Wyatt. They met against a background of a serious fuel crisis in the severe winter of early 1947, and amidst fears that Labour’s socialist advance was slowing down. The economic crisis of the summer of 1947 was another major factor. The outcome was Keep Left, a pamphlet which appeared in May 1947, in time for the party conference at Margate.25 It was the product of a draft ‘red paper’ worked out with Foot and Mikardo at Richard Crossman’s home at Radnage in Buckinghamshire. It included calls for 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 threat to the West and the viability of Britain’s huge overseas commitments, his judgements became the conventional wisdom years later. Even at the time, they crystallized some of the discontent amongst the left-wing middle-class intelligentsia of which Tosco Fyvel wrote in Tribune.33 At the very least, Foot was surely right in urging a debate on fundamental geopolitical principles. On Europe, his enthusiasm for closer union was part of a wider critique of British foreign policy, and his vision of a united Europe was distinctly vague. Even so, the European opportunity was an immense gap in Britain’s world view after 1945. Some of the Labour left picked it up more rapidly than many on the right, such as Gaitskell with his uncritical Atlanticism.

The most tentative area of Foot’s analysis of international relations, then and always, was his view of the United States. Unlike his father Isaac, who had been on an extensive morale-boosting lecture tour in 1943, Michael was no ‘special relationship’ man. He had relatively few close American contacts (though he had almost married one of them), and many of them were critics, like the venerable journalist Walter Lippman, the trade unionist Walter Reuther, or the left-wing humorous columnist Dorothy Parker. He was excited by New York City, but rarely visited America, and had limited appreciation of its history or geopolitics. He seldom reviewed books on American history after the time of Tom Paine. His view of America hovered somewhere midway between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, as he veered between ideological suspicion of American capitalism and endorsement of the visionary Marshall Plan and the military necessity for NATO. Nye Bevan was much the same. But at least in 1945–51 Foot could explore a range of options for relations with the US, compared with the confrontational atmosphere of the fifties between East and West, over China and the bomb above all.

On domestic issues, Foot’s Commons speeches followed a fairly unremarkable course in their calls for more socialism. He did not seem to specialize in any particular topic. However, there was one domestic theme on which he took the lead – the influence and political imbalance of the press. Here he was following the lead of his own union, the National Union of Journalists. He launched fierce attacks on the monopolistic right-wing proprietors who controlled at least 80 per cent of British newspapers. Lords Kemsley and Rothermere were his main targets, but Beaverbrook also, his once revered patron, did not escape his barbs. In July 1946 he joined over a hundred Labour MPs, several of them journalists, in asking for an inquiry into the ‘monopolistic tendencies’ in the British press. On 29 October he seconded a motion in the House by Haydn Davies calling for a Royal Commission on the concentration of ownership of newspapers. Almost ritualistically, he threw in personal abuse of key proprietors: he could not understand why the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had apologized to them for using the term ‘gutter press’.34 As it happened, Foot was pushing an open door, since ministers as powerful as Dalton and Morrison lent their support, and a Royal Commission duly went about its work in 1947–49 under the erudite chairmanship of an Oxford classics don, Sir David Ross.

When Foot gave evidence before it on 12 November 1947 he attacked newspaper chains which were taking over local journals (including in Plymouth) and the interference of proprietors with editorial freedom.35 His examples were drawn from his own experience under Beaverbrook. His most startling allegations concerned the ‘blacklists’ which Beaverbrook maintained, including the refusal to review plays by Noël Coward, concerts conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham or the film Proud Valley, which featured the left-wing black American baritone Paul Robeson. Kemsley, he said, also ran a blacklist – for a time none other than Beaverbrook himself was on it! In a second appearance before the inquiry on 18 December, he urged something like American anti-trust legislation to prevent multiple ownership, though this was opposed later by another witness, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst (the father of Foot’s former love Connie).36 Foot gave a confident performance on both occasions, and dealt firmly with a somewhat patronizing enquiry from Lady Violet Bonham Carter. But, predictably, the Royal Commission’s findings were mundane. They saw no danger in the concentration of press ownership, and proposed merely the weak option of a Press Council, run by the newspapers themselves, to consider complaints.37 Tribune denounced the report as ‘tepid and unimaginative’, and the Press Council proved a frail reed over the decades. Aneurin Bevan, who had drifted away from his pre-war connection with Beaverbrook, was to denounce Britain’s capitalist press as ‘the most prostituted in the world’.

Foot’s grievances against the Tory-run daily press continued to fester, not least with Express Newspapers, which pilloried the Labour government mercilessly. But if the Royal Commission had no major impact, his relations with Beaverbrook were certainly affected. The old press proprietor was evidently upset by Foot’s attacks after their close relationship, even though his own evidence to the Royal Commission made almost no direct reference to it. Friends proposed a reconciliation, and Beaverbrook himself wrote to Foot expressing his sadness at their estrangement: ‘The separation that has lasted too long has distressed me. The reunion will give me joy.’ Foot accepted an invitation to a dinner in honour of the old man’s seventieth birthday at the Savoy in early 1949. Invited to speak impromptu, he delighted Beaverbrook with a quotation about a venerable sage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he then revealed referred to Beelzebub. This comparison seems to have been in Foot’s mind for some time: in Tribune on 26 November 1948, ‘Beelzebub Wants the Job’ had compared Churchill to his infernal majesty.38 At the Savoy, though, the magic of friendship was restored, the presence of Jill, whom the old man much liked, being a major contributory factor. Express Newspapers did not change its anti-socialist politics, and neither did Beaverbrook. But his affectionate relationship with Foot was henceforth unshakeable. In all the political crises of the fifties, Foot remained in the closest touch with his former employer, an almost filial and purely personal connection at a time when he was in the bitterest conflict with right-wing comrades in the Labour Party. Each materially helped the other. Beaverbrook helped Tribune with money, and would provide Michael and Jill with a temporary home. Foot was the vital link in introducing Beaverbrook to one of his closest friends, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor.39 And he virtually never attacked the Beaverbrook press again.