I've just read a load of stuff about Michael Foot. Jesus, politics today is a load of crap. That Foot is considered by many to have been a failure in political terms shows just how corrupted and detatched the political world has become. Perhaps it was always thus.
Foot should be seen as the last credible defender (in the UK at least) of the possibility of a different and better world, one to which the value of the equality of all human lives is central.
I say credible defender becuase not only was Foot an exceptional journalist, editor and writer, but because he somehow managed to negotiate the murky world of politics, and succeed within it, without compromising his principles. His old foe Tony Benn has also remained a politician of undiluted principle, but he never fully made it in politics; at least not until he withdrew from the frontline.
Foot was able to combine priciple and power, though because the world of politics has divested itself of any pretence to principle, he was not able to halt the shift towards a 'world in which people struggling to be individual end up being more and more like each other', as Brian Brivati writes in this excellent tribute re-printed in today's Guardian.
Foot opposed Margaret Thatcher at the despatch box, but lost the 1983 election because to few people any longer cared about what really matters; or about how we are properly to measure civilisational progress.
How is one to get excited at the prospect of the forthcoming election when the ethos of those contesting it is so removed from that of Michael Foot?
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