LITMIR.BIZ

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his Who’s Who entry. This was a volume of nearly three hundred pages, published by the left-wing publisher newly set up by Victor Gollancz. It was entitled The Struggle for Peace. Just over 150 pages consisted of a text on international affairs by Cripps; the remaining 127 pages consisted of ‘References’ written by Foot, in effect around forty thousand words of extended notes on Cripps’s text.³⁶ These show Foot in the most intensely Marxist vein he was ever to demonstrate throughout his life. They do not provide a tribute to the young man’s critical faculties, and it is not surprising that he should try to expunge the memory of them thereafter. They focus on armaments expenditure by the great powers, on economic imperialism, on the cruelties and exploitation by Britain of its colonies, in a seemingly mechanical fashion.

      In this book, while Foot often quotes from left-wing authors at home, notably Brailsford and Leonard Barnes, most of his sources come from the far left or from Communists, especially the famous Indian theoretician of the Leninist view of empire, R. Palme Dutt, who is repeatedly praised. He is commended for his ‘graphic description’ of world rearmament; his account of the prospects for increasing productive capacity in Fascism and Social Revolution is ‘a brilliant analysis’. As it happened, when Foot met the doctrinaire Palme Dutt later on, he never got on with him.³⁷ Other works cited are even more remarkable. The source for a stated link between military strategy and the profit motive is Bukharin’s article on ‘Imperial Communism’. Most remarkable of all is the work on which a treatment of the economic exploitation of the colonies is based – Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s conclusion that colonial rebellions must inevitably be socialist is endorsed (and a letter from a young African nationalist resident in London, Joshua Nkomo, is thrown in for confirmation). Foot adds: ‘The methods by which the Soviet government has dealt with the colonial peoples reveal a real basis for cooperation with so-called backward peoples as soon as the power of capitalism within the imperialist nation has been effectively broken. This subject is dealt with in the Webbs’ Soviet Communism and Joshua Kunitz’s book Dawn Over Samarkand.’³⁸ At least Foot’s notes are more fun to read than Cripps’s leaden text on such themes as ‘working-class unity is the only true foundation for world peace’. But they too are eminently forgettable. Equally, it is clear that they are quite untypical of Foot’s libertarian and pluralist approach to socialism, and reflect contemporary pressure from Stafford Cripps on his young co-author. Unlike young men such as Denis Healey who joined the Communist Party in the thirties, Foot’s thinking never advanced any formal structural analysis based on the dialectic. He seldom made important reference to Marx in his later writings, other than to say how thrilling his (remarkably vague) vision of a post-capitalist utopia really was. Nor did he find the one contemporary example of Communism in practice at all appealing. He visited Stalin’s Russia for just two days – a stay in Leningrad at the end of a holiday in Helsinki with brother Dingle in 1937 – and disliked it. He was not to go again until an official visit as Labour leader in 1981.

      Foot now did show signs of having a clearer idea of his career. For a young man obsessed with words and politics, journalism beckoned as an inevitably appealing career. But it was a slow start. He persuaded Kingsley Martin, editor of the establishment organ of the left the New Statesman, to give him a temporary job on his magazine. He spent almost a year there in 1936–37 to little effect, on a meagre annual stipend of £250. His abiding memory was of sessions every Thursday night with Allen Hutt of the Daily Worker, who taught him about the intricacies of typography as well as stimulating his ideas on socialism and his resistance to fascism. But Kingsley Martin was not over-impressed with his young recruit. Foot, he thought, was ‘not a bad journalist but not A plus’. It seems in retrospect an amazing misjudgement by an often dangerously opinionated and dogmatic man. Michael himself looked back without affection on ‘semi-freelance penury’ in Martin’s offices.³⁹ Martin later realized his mistake. In November 1943 he wrote to Beaverbrook saying that he had heard that Foot was ceasing to be editor of the Evening Standard and asking permission for him to write occasional articles for the New Statesman, but Beaverbrook courteously refused.⁴⁰ Despite much subsequent collaboration, from the Second Front campaign in 1943 to CND in 1958, Foot and Martin, like the New Statesman and Tribune, were never close. In the late thirties, and for much of his career, Martin, like Victor Gollancz, was a sentimental fellow-traveller, liable to suppress material by Wells, Orwell and others which criticized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Contrary to what was sometimes implied by right-wing commentators, that could never be said of the libertarian democrat Michael Foot.

      Stafford Cripps ensured that his distinctly hard-up protégé found a more enjoyable job almost immediately. In January 1937, as noted above, the weekly Tribune came into being as the voice of the far left. Its editor was William Mellor, the paramour of Barbara Betts. Michael Foot received a staff post on it, while Barbara also contributed as a freelance. They wrote a column together on trade union matters under the name of ‘Judex’. Foot wrote later of his own role as ‘cook’s assistant and chief bottle-washer in the backroom’.⁴¹ So, in fairly humble fashion, began Foot’s association with this famous organ of the Labour left, which continued for the rest of his life, as editor, director, board member and patron. It was to Tribune rather than Victor Gollancz’s more conventional Left Book Club, let alone the official Labour Party, that he hitched his star.

      For a time working on Tribune seemed rather fun. It kept Foot in close touch with Cripps, whose massive private funding enabled the paper, with its few thousand readers, to keep going. Writing twenty-one years later, Foot cheerfully recalled that working with Mellor was ‘like living in the foothills of Vesuvius. Yet, between the eruptions, the exhilaration was tremendous.’ For Mellor, ‘socialist principles were as hard as granite’.⁴² The newspaper had a distinguished editorial board of Cripps (the chairman), Laski, Brailsford, George Strauss, Ellen Wilkinson and an up-and-coming and highly charismatic Welsh backbench MP, Aneurin Bevan, who wrote a weekly parliamentary column. Foot saw him only occasionally at this time, but the ideological and personal spell that Bevan cast was largely to determine the rest of his career. Tribune also brought Foot into contact with influential foreign émigrés, notably Julius Braunthal of the Austrian Socialists, who wrote for Tribune regularly. Foot much admired his later multi-volume history of the Socialist International, and in 1948 wrote a powerful preface to his Tragedy of Austria, a plea for closer cooperation between German and Austrian socialists. Foot was to observe here: ‘No one with any kindred feeling can read the story of Red Vienna without being a better socialist for it.’⁴³ Despite all its writing talent, much of 1937 was occupied for Tribune with sorting out the mess after the dissolution of the Socialist League. There were more promising avenues to pursue as well. One of them was championing the right of constituency parties to be directly represented through election to Labour’s National Executive, which happened at party conference in 1937. But throughout 1938 there were endless strains, to which Cripps was a major contributing factor. They were occasioned, as so often on the left, by difficult relations with other leftish bodies, such as the Left Book Club, whose publisher Victor Gollancz was a distinctly combustible character, and at this time of sentimentally pro-Soviet fellow-travelling outlook. In the background were the show trials and purges in the Soviet Union, of which Barbara Betts wrote quite uncritically under guidance from Intourist, and which D. N. Pritt QC hailed as showing how the rule of law was entrenched under Stalin, but which Michael Foot, ex-Liberal, condemned from the start. He particularly objected to Tribune’s refusal even to mention the show trials of Nikolai Bukharin and other victims.

      Tribune reached a crisis point in July 1938. Cripps sought an agreement with Gollancz to merge the journal with the Left Book Club, so that it could pursue an uninhibited Unity Front, pro-Soviet policy. This meant the resignation of Tribune’s editor William Mellor, a tetchy and difficult man for all his personal

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