“Tories, who for generations have denied the existence of a shortage in housing or schools, suddenly discover that there are not enough houses or schools and use the statistics of their own shameful record to blame the black workers. Yet their arguments touch a sensitive nerve among white workers who are only too aware of the shortages around them.”
This snippet of political analysis could easily have been updated and adapted into the narrative of the last decade of Conservative rule in the UK. The thoughts are from a 1973 pamphlet, Workers Against Racism, written by the late Paul Foot, one of the great investigative reporters, and the subject of this excellent and timely biography befitting his life, work and legacy.
Now the Conservatives are out, and (New) Labour (2.0) is in power once more on the 20th anniversary of Foot’s premature death, it’s hard not to float the hypothetical, “What would Footie have made of it all?” much the same way we instinctively reach for “What would Orwell think?” on matters of public life.
Orwell was one of Foot’s heroes, which is easy to comprehend with their backgrounds overlapping somewhat, and both having made it their mission in life to combine pen and politics to prick the fat backsides of the privileged. There are plenty of pricks pricked by Foot in this book, written by journalist and former colleague Margaret Renn, who meticulously measures just how much good he achieved through his intrepid journalism and enduring activism. It’s an admirable account of a remarkable righter of wrongs in Foot, portrayed in limpid yet powerful prose.
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Cover-ups, corruption, incompetence and injustice — usually emanating from the panjandrums above — was what fired Foot in his efforts at holding the establishment’s feet to the flames. He came from this establishment, of course; public school before an Oxford education, and was born into a political family dynasty with his uncle Michael rising to become leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s. (The Foots must have been a newspaper subeditor’s dream; Michael himself inspired one of the great headlines: Foot Heads Arms Body.)
A Life in Politics is an apposite title, then. Paul was more devoted to the politics taking place from below, though. His concerns were for ordinary people, campaigners and organisers, for those on the left of the labour movement, and anyone being unfairly attacked that could not fight back. The cretinous kind in political life, those greasing their way to the top while looking at politics as merely a game or some form of enrichment, only interested Foot if he could expose and nail them for the charlatans that they were.
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As a committed socialist and staunch trade unionist, Foot’s politics were relatively simple and noble: he believed in a fair society with equal rights for everyone, and in a world where public resources should be organised for the betterment of all. He died believing this was possible. He wasn’t po-faced in his beliefs either, as his old comrade Eamonn McCann observed: “I’ve never known a man who could laugh so much at the absurdity of the system we live under.” The two must have giggled at the time they arranged a meeting in Kilburn, London, at the start of the Irish civil rights movement. Not one person turned up.
Foot’s brilliance as a journalist and speaker rendered his affluent background a matter of circumstance and allowed him to work for publications across the political spectrum (Daily Mirror, Private Eye, Socialist Worker, London Review of Books etc). He could speak with conviction in a young socialists’ club in the Gorbals or at a Welsh miners’ gathering, as well as appearing on the BBC or staging talks at his old university. He was a friend of Ireland — Foot loved holidays here — and was dogged in exposing the duality of the British government’s role during the Troubles (see his book on Colin Wallace and the British army in Northern Ireland, for just one example). He added his voice to the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four campaigns, shared platforms with Bernadette Devlin, who in his mind brought to Westminster a “flavour of the revolt that was taking place not just in Northern Ireland but in many other places too”.
Renn recounts all this, and much more, vividly, lovingly: the hard grind years of investigative journalism; the rough-and-tumble of revolutionary politics and activism; and living through the upheavals of a society torn to pieces during Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Renn also captures the generous, warm and witty Foot, adored by family and friends, the bibliophile and lover of poetry and cricket. It’s a deserved testament to someone who will forever inspire journalists, new and old; someone who proved you can write and fight for what you believe in.
