Michael Foot- A Utopian Architect Of The Failed British State

I never met Michael Foot, I do not know his family and I am sure that he was loved by all and was kind to dogs.

I was not proposing to comment on his passing but after reading the obituries this morning and the political classes warm embrace of his memory, including Thatcher calling him a great Parliamentarian, I feel compelled to make some comment on his political legacy.

Foot fancied himself as a man of letters, the nearest thing to what the British will accept as an intellectual. This morning I was confronted over my cornflakes the nausea inducing photo of the younger Gordon sitting at the masters feet (table)

Foot was not an Edwardian man of letters (BBC) he along with others provided a legitimacy to the abandonment of Liberalism to the despotism of Socialism in the interwar period. He came from the same class that betrayed the Spanish Republicans to the Stalinists, and allowed Franco's Authoritarians to maintain their grip on the Iberian peninsula for nearly forty years.

Let me quote from a contemporary of Foot's, writing in 1944.

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilisation the modern trend towards socialism means, becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of nineteenth century, but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not merely the views of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western Civilisation as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans.

Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides is progressively relinquished.


As to Foot's dreaming Utopianism

The extraorodinary thing is that the same socialism that was not only early recognised as the gravest threat to freedom, but quite openly began as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution, gained acceptance under the flag of liberty, It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian.

Mourn the man if you will, but do not mourn his brand of socialism that has created CCTV cameras on every street corner, endemic continuing poverty amongst the underclass, a client state utterly dependent on Nu-Labour's client State. Foot was one of the architects of this failed British State.