Ultratron upgrading
Towards statism and Moscow influence in the 50s. Michael Foot's political career mirrored that of the Labour tradition: from pacifism to anti-fascist resistance in 30s and 40s. The joke, and the delivery brought the house down. I lent it to Paul and he thought I'd forgotten it, but I got it back." He flicked a wry grin at the audience, full of the dead man's friends and family: "In fact he had his eye on my books, you know - but he won't be getting them now." Or stand up for long.īut he launched into an eloquent speech which included a reading from CLR James' book "The Black Jacobins": Michael and Paul Foot shared a lifelong obsession with the Haitian slave rebellion and were both fans of James' seminal piece of social history. Michael Foot had to be helped onto the stage at the Hackney Empire and you could feel the audience worrying that he might not be able to make any sense. The last time I saw Michael Foot was at a memorial meeting after the death of his nephew, the left wing journalist Paul Foot. Within a week, Foot laconically records, the Germans had overrun Norway. Foot used the fatal words of British ministers and generals against them: Chamberlain's famous claim, on the eve of Dunkirk, that Hitler "has missed the bus" General Ironside's pronouncement: "Frankly, we could welcome an attack". But it was one of the seminal pieces of journalism that shaped the anger over Britain's defeat in May 1940 and turned the conflict into what we now know as the "people's war". It did not cause the fall of Chamberlain or the rise of Churchill - that had already happened.
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Guilty Men is a piece by piece demolition job on the British establishment in the run-up to World War Two. (Its surtitle is "Victory Book Number 1"). Written in July 1940, my Gollancz edition dustjacket - the 21st impression produced just three months later - proclaims "110,000 copies sold". The second memory I have is invoked by the book I've just pulled down off my shelves: "Guilty Men" by "Cato" - Michael Foot's pseudonym. I remember the general feeling in the crowd was: hold on a minute, who's responsible for the slumbering in the first place? He was not greeted with elation: the unions were still angry with Labour for the mess they had made in government and I remember a number of donkey-jacketed blokes shaking their heads at the rhetoric - shopfloor militancy had a whole different kind of rhetoric of its own. He finished off his speech with the famous passage from Shelley, written after the Peterloo Massacre: "Rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number, shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you.
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He was in his duffle coat speaking to a massive crowd of miners, shipyard workers, car workers. I can remember the person next to me heckling him as he spoke. The occasion was the first big demonstration called by the Labour Party against unemployment. The first time I ever saw Michael Foot was in 1980, in Glasgow.