[Marxism] Paul Foot's last book

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Up with the swinish multitude

Francis Wheen can hear Paul Foot's distinctive voice in his history of 
representative democracy, The Vote

Saturday February 26, 2005
The Guardian

The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined
by Paul Foot
506pp, Viking, £25

On my bedside table I have a few CD recordings of speeches by Paul Foot. 
When insomnia strikes in the small hours it's a tremendous consolation to 
hear that voice again, with its throaty laugh and occasional leaps from 
rich baritone to exuberant tenor as he holds forth about the Peasants' 
Revolt, the Haitian slave rebellion, the Paris Commune or the poetry of 
Shelley.

The same voice resonates through this exhilarating book, completed shortly 
before his death last July. Encountering phrases such as "clapped-out 
reactionaries", or "a career in parliamentary cretinism", one hears the 
boisterous chuckle that so enlivened his conversation, his oratory and his 
journalism. There is also a cherishable reminiscence of the 1945 election, 
at which his grandfather and two uncles all seemed likely to be returned as 
Liberal MPs.

The only winner was a third uncle, the renegade Michael, who had abandoned 
the Liberals for Labour and was standing against hopeless odds in Plymouth 
Devonport. Seven-year-old Paul Foot guessed that something extraordinary 
had happened, but "there was no one around to explain it to me, least of 
all my grandfather, who shut himself up in his bedroom for five days". Paul 
himself ran for parliament in a 1977 byelection, confident that voters were 
ready to replace a servile Labour government with a revolutionary 
Trotskyist regime. As he records with characteristic self-mockery, "I 
barely polled 1 per cent."

Giving people the vote is one thing, getting them to vote for Paul Foot 
quite another. Unlike some fellow-Marxists, however, he did not consider 
bourgeois democracy "basically irrelevant". For much of his life, this 
question nagged away at him: "The working class was in a majority, and from 
time to time the workers were likely to elect politicians committed to 
their interests. Why, when this happened, had elected socialists been so 
pathetic in office?" The second half of the book duly describes how and why 
Labour governments since the 20s have betrayed or disappointed the people 
who most needed them. First, however, he recounts how we reached a position 
where Labour governments were even conceivable.

The idea of representative democracy entered British public discourse in 
the 1640s, mainly through a blizzard of gloriously intemperate pamphlets 
from the pen of John Lilburne. "Unnatural, irrational, sinful, wicked, 
unjust, devilish and tyrannical it is," he wrote, "for any man whatsoever - 
spiritual or temporal, clergyman or layman - to appropriate and assume unto 
himself a power, authority and jurisdiction to rule, govern or reign over 
any sort of men in the world without their free consent." The specific 
reforms he proposed included annual parliaments, publication of their 
debates and votes, payment of MPs, equalisation of constituencies and the 
abolition of rotten boroughs. "It seemed obvious," Foot writes. Obvious, 
perhaps, but none too easy to establish. The six demands listed in the 
People's Charter of 1838 were almost identical to those of John Lilburne 
two centuries earlier.

Standing in the way of elementary fairness was the propertied class, and 
its terror of what Edmund Burke called the swinish multitude. "The 
doctrines promulgated by the Chartists were doctrines of perfect insanity," 
Lord Abinger declared in 1842. "A popular assembly devoted to democratic 
principles and elected by persons, a vast majority of whom have no property 
and depend on manual labour ... the first thing such an assembly would do 
would be to aim at the destruction of property and the putting down of the 
monarchy." Foot had a special pompous-oaf accent he put on when quoting 
this sort of buffoonery, and one hears it often as he romps gleefully 
through the arguments over the various reform bills.

Disraeli warned in 1866 that any increase in the number of voters would 
drive out "families of historic lineage" and bring into the House "a horde 
of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief". A 
year later, following a change of government, Disraeli himself pushed 
through a reform act which quadrupled the electorate. And the consequence? 
After the 1868 general election there were actually more nobles and sons of 
nobles in the administration than there had been in 1865. Politicians 
belatedly realised that an extended franchise wasn't necessarily a recipe 
for mischief: it might actually legitimise their tenure of power and thus 
prevent public agitation from assuming a revolutionary character. As Foot 
observes: "Even Tories like Disraeli could claim that their legislation 
represented at least to some extent the will of millions of people."

Of course there were many more battles to be had - over the complete 
abolition of property qualifications, the lowering of the voting age and 
the vexed question of votes for women (resisted by some Labour party 
members for fear that it would create a permanent Conservative majority). 
Yet many proponents of universal suffrage were just as deluded, in their 
own way, as the Adullamites who clung to their rotten boroughs as if 
civilisation depended on them. Ramsay MacDonald predicted that 
enfranchisement of "the common folk" would bring about a "fundamental 
change in the political intelligence" by making the state the ally of the 
poor rather than their rival. But by the time he chose the first Labour 
cabinet, in 1923, it was apparent that MacDonald intended no threat to the 
status quo: his senior ministers included one Liberal and two Tories.

This brings Foot to the second part of his story, a survey of what Labour 
governments have actually done since the advent of votes for all. Though 
not unremittingly negative - he thinks the Attlee government played a 
blinder in 1945-47, but then took its eye off the ball - the mood of this 
section is in sharp contrast to the heroic history that precedes it.

Why did a popularly elected parliament not confirm the worst fears of those 
Victorian doom-mongers who foresaw the destruction of property and the 
putting down of the monarchy? No doubt the allure of office had something 
to do with it: the old corruption of rotten and pocket boroughs yielded to 
a new corruption of pelf and place. Starting with the ghastly Jimmy Thomas 
MP, the former union leader who acquired a taste for white tie and tails, 
Foot offers a long catalogue of socialists who went weak at the knees when 
embraced by the establishment.

The main reason, however, is the yoking of parliamentary democracy to a 
polity where most institutions remain stubbornly undemocratic. From the 
economic crisis of 1931, through the devaluation crisis of 1967, to the IMF 
crisis of 1976, British governments have often learned the hard way that 
they are no match for the forces of capital. "Whenever we try to do 
anything," Attlee warned in 1932, "we will be opposed by every vested 
interest, financial, political and social."

In November 1964 Harold Wilson complained to the governor of the Bank of 
England that "a newly elected government with a mandate from the people was 
being told ... that the policies on which we had fought the election could 
not be implemented; that the government was to be forced into the adoption 
of Tory policies to which it was fundamentally opposed". According to 
Wilson, "the governor confirmed that that was in fact the case".

Tony Blair has had no such confrontation, largely because his government 
accedes to almost every demand from big business and its janissaries. (Why 
else are we getting super-casinos? Not, I think, because of clamorous pleas 
from Labour's electorate.) Every time New Labour confirms the impotence of 
representative government, yet more people decide that they might as well 
not bother to vote at all.

While illuminating our democratic deficit, Foot doesn't fall into the trap 
of dismissing liberal democracy altogether: "Whatever its chronic 
weaknesses and paralyses, the parliamentary system and the thin gruel of 
democracy it offers us are indispensable to any agitation for progress." 
How odd, then, that his book concludes by urging us all to join the 
Socialist Workers' party - the same party which derides last month's 
elections in Iraq, where millions of voters turned out despite enormous 
difficulties, while it cheers on the Ba'athist neo-fascists and theocratic 
gangsters of the so-called "resistance". Are car bombs really more 
democratic and progressive than universal suffrage, however thin its gruel?

As so often since his death, I yearn to take him to a café and argue this 
out - and I know he would have come. Paul Foot never ducked a fight. 
Passionate, energetic and invincibly cheerful: the qualities of his final 
book are also a monument to the man himself.

· Francis Wheen's latest book is How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World 
(Fourth Estate)

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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