Michael Foot

"It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it."

"People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement"

"[The constituency will be certain to return a socialist candidate] and this will help gain a socialist majority in the Commons and help Britain on the way to becoming a socialist republic."

"It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country—and especially the rights of trade unionists—if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country."

"There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate"

"The history of British Socialism cannot be written without constant reference to the Celts, and perhaps I may say in passing that this was one reason why I was so eager to see a Devolution Act passed through the House of Commons, to help keep the Celts within the United Kingdom. The blood of our Labour Movement cannot tingle properly without them, devolution or no devolution."

"Few words in our language have been more sadly debased than the name 'Radical'. Once it could strike terror into the ranks of wealth and privilege. Now it has been purloined even by the palest and pinkest critics of current orthodoxy. A Radical nowadays may merely be one who can be distinguished by his respectability from a Socialist."

"You just want the Tories in, and then we will be in the Common Market for life. You, with your halo of martyrdom. I've been anti-Market longer than you."

"It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat."

"The Leader of the Liberal Party—and I say this with the utmost affection—has passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever."

"What will once again be the choice at the next election? It will not be so dissimilar from the choice that the country had to make in 1945, or even in 1940 when the Labour Party had to come to the rescue of the country... It was on a motion of the Labour Party that the House of Commons threw out the Chamberlain Government in 1940. It was thanks to the Labour Party that Churchill had the chance to serve the country in the war years. Two-thirds of the Conservative Party at that time voted for the same reactionary policies as they will vote for tonight. It is sometimes in the most difficult and painful moments of our history that the country has turned to the Labour Party for salvation, and it has never turned in vain. We saved the country in 1940, and we did it again in 1945. We set out to rescue the country—or what was left of it—in 1974. Here again in 1979 we shall do the same."

"What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them"

"If only my hon. Friend would conduct the novel experiment of listening with his ears instead of his voice, a whole new world would open to him."

"Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain."

"He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street"

"Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power"

"In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind"

"Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law"

"I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again."

"Since the matter has been raised, may I say that the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party, and, so far as I am concerned, never will be endorsed? [Interruption.] May I add that, as the Labour Party has played the leading part in the establishment and sustenance of parliamentary democracy, we do not need any instructions on the matter from skin-deep democrats on the Conservative Benches or defectors on this side?"

"She has no imagination and that means no compassion"

"The rights and the circumstances of the people in the Falkland Islands must be uppermost in our minds. There is no question in the Falkland Islands of any colonial dependence or anything of the sort. It is a question of people who wish to be associated with this country and who have built their whole lives on the basis of association with this country. We have a moral duty, a political duty and every other kind of duty to ensure that that is sustained. The people of the Falkland Islands have the absolute right to look to us at this moment of their desperate plight, just as they have looked to us over the past 150 years. They are faced with an act of naked, unqualified aggression, carried out in the most shameful and disreputable circumstances. Any guarantee from this invading force is utterly worthless—as worthless as any of the guarantees that are given by this same Argentine junta to its own people."

"We are paramountly concerned, like, I am sure, the bulk of the House—I am sure that the country is also concerned—about what we can do to protect those who rightly and naturally look to us for protection. So far, they have been betrayed. The responsibility for the betrayal rests with the Government. The Government must now prove by deeds—they will never be able to do it by words—that they are not responsible for the betrayal and cannot be faced with that charge. That is the charge, I believe, that lies against them. Even though the position and the circumstances of the people who live in the Falkland Islands are uppermost in our minds—it would be outrageous if that were not the case—there is the longer-term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet."

"I know a fascist when I see one."

"“Think of it, a free Italy: it is the poetry of politics”, wrote Byron at a dark moment in the history of the Italian Risorgimento. Think of it, a free, democratic Socialist Spain – there is surely still some poetry in that kind of politics today, even if it is beyond the imagination of such stunted, pusillanimous souls as Bernard Levin."

"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."

"We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership"

"One of the worst aspects of this incursion is the conspiratorial way in which the leaders of the Militant Tendency have sought to operate without a membership and thereby to circumvent the rules of the [Labour] party, with or without any proscribed list. It was for this reason that, on my initiative, we took steps, with the later full backing of the party conference, to exclude the Militant leadership from our ranks. ... The task of freeing the party from Militant and kindred pestilences is not an easy one. But it has to be done, and it has to be done by methods which are fair. I strongly support all the steps which Neil Kinnock has taken to this end."

"It is all the more necessary that we should prevent an extension of the powers of the European Assembly, however it may be elected. I have been opposed to the extension of those powers, and I remain so. ... We must preserve every precious part of the power that we retain in the House."

"The right hon. Member for Heseltine—[Laughter.]—well, that is what he is; he sticks to that principle more than he does to Henley."

"It's quite a change to have a prime minister who hasn't got any political ideas at all."

"No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist."

"I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished and I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself"

"Foot has not built a wall of words so much as a battering ram. It is a lexicon of positive politics; an overtly partisan rhetoric that has been forged from an intimate acquaintance with three centuries of radical writing. ... It is based on a belief of our shared humanity across races, peoples and to a lesser extent classes. At the heart of Foot's political credo is the articulation of a burning desire for equality of outcome. But perhaps even more pressing is the unrelenting demand for a peace that means more than simply an absence of war: a peace based on justice and international accountability. ... Much of the writing in this collection is as much about literature for its own sake as about politics; as much about love as Labour; as much about passion as power. Indeed, Foot the great humanist has a credo based on a trinity: politics, poetry and passion."

"Michael Foot was a genuine British radical - one who possessed a powerful sense of community, a pride in our progressive past and faith in our country's potential for a radical future."

"I was caught on the hop in one of my interviews last week with the question: “Of all the people you have served with, who would you like to serve with again?” ... My reply was instinctive. Believe it or not, I said “Michael Foot”."

"[After Argentina's invasion of the Falklands] Michael Foot – popularly seen as a sentimental old pacifist – was demanding a military response to wipe away the stain of national humiliation... In fact Foot was not a pacifist at all. As an ardent young journalist he had been one of the authors of Guilty Men, the famous indictment of the Chamberlain Government's unreadiness for war in 1939, and he still harked back to 1940 as emotionally as any Churchillian. In his very different way he expressed the national mood of outraged patriotism as authentically as Mrs Thatcher herself."

"We remember Michael and celebrate his life not just as the life of an intelligent and principled politician but as a great British Humanist. A good life for all is a humanist aspiration, and Michael was one humanist who worked hard to make that a reality for every man and woman. His steadfast dedication to humanist and progressive ideals of freedom, peace, social justice was pursued in a life of both thought and action – another humanist ideal."

"Arriving for a recent away game at Selhurst Park, a steward asked the ninetysomething Foot whether he was carrying an offensive weapon, whereupon he produced a battered copy of Milton's selected poems, explaining that Milton's poetry represented one of the most potent weapons in English history."

"Farewell Michael Foot: Great orator, editor and thinker - the most decent leader Labour ever had."

"Michael Foot has been a great parliamentarian – perhaps the best I witnessed during my 33 years in the House of Commons. He had a particular talent for the spontaneous epigram. Jim Callaghan, he said, “does everything on purpose”. He loved the business of Parliament and believed in the Commons as a bastion of democracy. He would have been most at home in the Victorian Westminster when literature and learning were an essential requirement of success."

"Michael and I went together to Buckingham Palace in the year of the Prince of Wales's engagement to Princess Diana. ... As we stood awkwardly in line...the Queen said that ‘Carlos’ (by which she meant the king of Spain) was being difficult about the honeymoon yacht calling in Gibraltar. “I told him,” the Queen said, “it's my son, my ship and my dockyard.” There was a long pause before Michael responded: “The first Elizabeth could not have put it better.” On the way back to the Commons I expressed my surprise that a man whom I supposed to be a republican should have said such a thing. I expected him to plead good manners. Instead he told me – more by way of reproof than explanation – “She was standing up for England.” Michael Foot is a patriot."

"The fact is that if Michael had gone well before the [1983] election, we might have won. We had no chance whatever so long as he was Leader."

"Michael Foot, who has died aged 96, was a supreme parliamentary democrat who used his great gifts as an inspiring speaker and writer to urge peace, security, prosperity and opportunity for humanity and punishment for bigots and bullies of every kind. His bravery and generosity were unsurpassed. He used both to ensure that the Labour party survived as a political force when self-indulgent factionalism could have doomed it to irrelevance."

"Foot's ultimate task, as orator, pamphleteer, and communicator extraordinary, has been to educate, and to relate the British variant of socialism to a long, but still relevant, history of British libertarian protest—in other words, to the real world. In his respect for parliament, for the rule of law (subject to some very valid doubts about the judgement of judges), for representative democracy, for the pluralism and tolerance embedded in the culture of his people, he has been in the best sense a force for stability. … He has re-articulated and vindicated a long, creative legacy of protest which in the 1970s seemed close to being corrupted or destroyed."

"I revealed how, when in Government, Michael Foot never once sat with the four senior Ministers who made the decisions on nuclear policy. It reflected my very strong view that a man who had deliberately avoided sharing responsibility before was not fit to take the sole responsibility now. Under Michael Foot, Labour would not have been fit to govern."

"The great talents and the outstanding oratory which have made the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot) easily the first, facile princeps, among the parliamentarians of this day have been displayed for week after week and month after month in the opposition to the [European Communities] Bill. When the history of this episode comes to be written his part in it will be seen to have been at a level with those of the great figures of parliamentary history."

"Michael Foot is a master of English. Both in parliamentary debate and in the written word his diction has the qualities of purity and terseness which the Augustans admired and sought. Indeed, it is of the age of Dryden and Pope, Addison and Swift, where he personally feels most at home, that he is the foremost modern heir and representative. His writing, like his speaking, is almost invariably perspicuous and graceful, offering no avoidable impediment to the reader, and concealing its imaginative quality with the artist's art. … Foot's Bevan will be among the outstanding biographies of the twentieth century."

"He was without question the master, spell-binding orator in the House of Commons in my day. When his name came up on the ticker-tape, people would come to hear him. He had this capacity for immense passion laced with humour."

"Michael Foot is a highly principled and cultivated man, invariably courteous in our dealings. If I did not think it would offend him, I would say he was a gentleman. In debate and on the platform he has a kind of genius."