Better take on the whole thing here:

http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2010/03/michael-foot-bollocks.html

I beg those who lament Foot’s passing by mourning a time when politics was “better”or “noble” to not let an expenses scandal (if that is the basis for this renewed dissatisfaction) undermine what we have done and must do.

I think the whole lying into wars thing played its part. Ooh! And complicity in rendition, that probably didn’t help. Grasping at civil liberties after telling a load of bull, that was never going to inspire confidence. Covering up the abuse of prisoners, that’s, well – never going to win you a Pride of Britain award.

Anyway, what’s “the noblest of pursuits“?

What BenSix said.

Ellie Gerard, if you or any other Labourite loyalists want the votes of progressive people, you are going to have to force your leadership and your MPs to apologise for all the awful shit they’ve done in office.

Enough crap about “defending the record”. Start making up for it.

Oh, and all the hatred they’ve whipped up against immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims in their pathetic attempt to appease the right-wing press. You criticise the Tories for their reactionaryism but remain silent when your own (like Liam Byrne and Phil Woolas) play the same cards.

Well put Ellie.

Richard Littlejohn doing a Jan Moir and dancing on Michael Foot’s grave this morning.
What a spiteful, little -indeed- individual.

If today somebody said to me you have to trust a rattle snake with your life or a Politician I’d take the rattle snake, it might try and bite me, it would not lie about it.

Brown today is lying through his teeth and I can say now he wants to be seen as a great leader, but he is without doubt weak hanger on.

Only my opinion

Re: 1

Worthless piece, once for comparing an erudite, elected parliamentarian to two brutal dictators, and doubly so for the update where he cravenly doubts his own view because it’s out of step with what his idol Hannan says.

Foot isn’t important for his politics – his socialist views are obviously discredited and it helps nobody to go back over them. What makes him worth remembering is that he practised politics the exact opposite of the way New Labour did – rather than listening to and courting public opinion, he utterly ignored it and obsessed over what he thought the real issues were. He profoundly lacked the common touch, and his indifference to the public serves as the cautionary tale for Libs, Labs, and Cons alike.

@1 Devil’s Kitchen writes some utter bilge sometimes. Utter Utter Bilge.

Ellie I agree with the sentiment that modern politics isn’t some aberation and particularly awful, but I think its just mediocre in the same way most of our Parliaments have been.

Some awful things, some alright things, lots of talking and a few people who stand out (Robin Cook) because they acted with principle. But that Robin Cook was an exception probably says something more general about politics than merely our current crop/

Read Smellyface’s “tribute” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1255529/Michael-Foot-good-Old-Footy-No-dangerous-deluded-hypocrite.html and remember for future reference…

@1, the post you reference is typically incoherent, poorly reasoned, and, inevitably for DK, liberally strewn with expletives. But, to provide you with some analysis and balance, I have some observations:

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2010/03/devils-heatstroke.html

– not that I’d want to rain on anyone’s parade, mind.

Good tribute to … well, Michael? Yeah, good writer, indeed, great speaker, too.

What one must realise is that yon Mr Foot would shy away from all this lovey-dovey stuff and tell those who seek the Labour Party back to get on with it.

As for:

Without a doubt Foot was a visionary politician, to some extent an idealist

… you come to praise him and then take a swipe at his memory because he was an idealist? He had more integrity in his left thumb than 90% of those who sit in Westminster today. People detest MPs not simply because of nicking a few quid out of the public purse – but because they are complicit in dividing a great nation and ruining peoples lives. Making the poor pay for the mistakes of their [MPs] own making. New Labour carrying forward Thatcher policies that led to where the UK is now. Taking civil liberties to a new, incomprehensible, low.

I was a member of the Labour Party way back then, the Labour party, not the toss that is merely the Tory-lite party that it is now. Michael was a loyalist to a fault, but he was never ‘New’ Labour. He saw what New Labour had become but would never, because of his loyalty say something against the party – maybe he should have. In his memory it would be great for the parasites that sit in Westminster on the government benches moved somewhat to the centre and then, if time allows, to the left again.

I wrote a post on Michael’s ‘suicide note in history’ – it seems he was that much of a visionary Cameron is going to use some of those policies.

New Labour is a right-wing party and it is about time that those who are members of it realised this, left it, and joined a party that looked at Michael as inspiration to dealing with today’s problems rather than being careerists that govern today.

Take all this sycophantic back-slapping and get on with the job of bring real employment and wealth back to the people – that will be more of a tribute to Michael than any soft word could ever be.

@ 6 and 10

Before Littlejohn became the saloon-bar-bigot on the Sun and the Mail, he started out as an Industrial Correspondent on the ‘Evening Standard’ with, in the early ’80s fairly leftish views (as you’d expect from a fella who spent a lot of time in the pub with trade union leaders). In fact the Labour Party offered him a parliamentary candidacy, which he turned down. Doesn’t mention thls does he?

Still the columns have made him a wealthy man, so much so that this Plain Speak Englishman now spends most of his time as a tax exile living in Florida

(his good mate Kelvin MacKenzie reviewing the papers on Sky News was in similar mode, just gloating about Michael Foot’s 1983 election defeat)

As for the rest of the article, I’m sort of with Will Self on QT last night when he said far fewer people were interested in the main political parties now than in 1979 because “you couldn’t put an anorexic, cigarette paper between them”

Stewart Lee sums up Richard Littlejohn (from about six minutes in):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGAOCVwLrXo

I wrote a post on Michael’s ’suicide note in history’ – it seems he was that much of a visionary Cameron is going to use some of those policies.

The re-introduction of exchange controls? Or of import quotas? Or withdrawal from the EEC? Or perhaps the five-year-plan on industry? I’m pretty sure that Cameron’s not proposing to nationalise BT either.

@ 14

Larry Elliot, Guardian, 3 March 2010:

‘In the summer of 1983 Gerald Kaufman called it “the longest suicide note in history”. In the autumn of 2008, it was the new orthodoxy.

After the fall of Lehman Brothers rocked the global financial system, Gordon Brown found that some of the ideas on which Michael Foot had fought the doomed 1983 campaign were not so daft after all. Big expansionary programme to lift Britain out of recession? Check. Programme to be paid for by increase in borrowing? Check. The state to exercise greater control over the City? Check.

Where Foot threatened to take the banks into public ownership if they refused to co-operate with the setting up of a national investment bank, Brown has actually nationalised one bank, Northern Rock, and taken hefty stakes in RBS and Lloyds.

Larry Elliott’

as has been noted elsewhere on this blog by organic cheeseboard, Gideon Osborne initally went: ‘ho ho ho it’s just like the 70s’ after the northern Rock bailout, he initially opposed it and then supported it…..

The great difference between Foot and so many (most?) of the current crop is that he wore his principles on his sleeve. Any compromises were therefore in plain sight, such as his necessary support of our troops once they had departed for the Falklands.

There are some times a politician has to bend with the times, but “pragmatism” has become such a buzzword these days that nobody knows who stands for what, just vague impressions of what parties used to mean. In the case of the tories defence of privilege still reigns. Labour? Lib Dem? Inceasingly meaningless as the left tries to redefine itself.

We need people like Foot more than ever, leaders from the left who will unashamedly stand for our politics. As I’ve said before, he is sadly missed.

Pedants corner: Is that not Jon Snow?

Note the highly amusing and entirely deliberate omission of the apostrophe there.

ah yes Michael Foot…trade union leader comes into his office and says, “If you give us a statutory 25% pay rise, we will not go on strike.”

Foot’s answer: “Is 25% enough?”

Bring back the 70s….Foot should never have been let anywhere near a position of power. There is a place for malcontents and there is a place for statesmen. Foot as a Minister was a disgrace.

19. Diogenes

This a tribute to a dead man.

If you can’t respect that then fuck off toe rag.

Again. You can see someone’s level of humanity when a person dies. I fully respect the fact that some people may disagree, even strongly and radically with Michael Foot’s politics.

But, like from the link @1, or Littlejohn’s article, or some low-rate humour found in some of the comments here, simply: have some fuckin respect for a dead man.

Yes, the righties have no dignity. Remember the next time they are winging about decency and standards.

They are just scum , pure and simple.

Mind you, when Thatch dies I’ll be first in line to piss on her grave.

You will need to stand in line mate, behind me, but warning piss on my legs and you have a black eye, wait your turn

It’ll be the greenest spot in the churchyard!

and of course let’s not forget the way Foot used to suck up to the wealthy, reactionary Lord Beaverbrook….just wondering why you are all getting so dewy-eyed about the man who did so much to ensure the longevity of Thatcher’s government

Fuck these people who say that, while he was certainly a nice guy etc, he was ineffective/unelectable/would have damaged this country. 1983 wasn’t his time because he couldn’t convince enough people that Thatcher was a liar who was destroying the country, but that’s what she was. He was right then and has been vindicated.

We should have listened to him, and then we’d have a sound economy like Germany instead of being in the shitter.

He also opposed the constant attacks on civil liberties by Thatcher, and if we didn’t have a Thatcherite economy we wouldn’t have an unfree society and the intrusions on our rights by this equally Thatcherite government because there would be less discontent and hopelessness amongst people whose grandfathers made an honest living but whose road to a decent life has been closed because it stopped corporations wringing any more money out of the country they hypocritically claim to “love”, when it comes to reeling out nationalist shite to divide the workers against each other.