 were Stafford Cripps's (Labour-affiliated) Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP). Foot resigned in 1938 after the paper's first editor, William Mellor, was sacked for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement. In a 1955 interview, Foot ideologically identified as a libertarian socialist.
He was an avid anti-imperialist and was heavily involved in the India League. As an Oxford graduate, he was influenced by the founder of the India League, Krishna Menon. The India League was the premier UK-based organisation that fought for the 'Liberation of India'. After Indian independence in 1947, Foot's interest in India continued, and he became Chair of the India League.
Journalism.
On the recommendation of Aneurin Bevan, Foot was soon hired by Lord Beaverbrook to work as a writer on his "Evening Standard". (Bevan is supposed to have told Beaverbrook on the phone: "I've got a young bloody knight-errant here. They sacked his boss, so he resigned. Have a look at him.") At the outbreak of the Second World War, Foot volunteered for military service, but was rejected because of his chronic asthma. It was suggested in 2009 that he was a member of the secret Auxiliary Units.
In 1940, under the pen-name "Cato" he and two other Beaverbrook journalists (Frank Owen, editor of the "Standard", and Peter Howard of the "Daily Express") published "Guilty Men", which attacked the appeasement policy and slow pace of British re-armament under the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain; it became a runaway bestseller. (In so doing, Foot reversed his position of the 1935 election – when he had attacked the Conservatives as militaristic and demanded disarmament in the face of Nazi Germany.) Beaverbrook made Foot editor of the "Evening Standard" in 1942, when he was aged 28. During the war, Foot made a speech that was later featured in the documentary TV series "The World at War" broadcast in February 1974. Foot was speaking in defence of the "Daily Mirror", which had criticised the conduct of the war by the Churchill government. He mocked the notion that the Government would make no more territorial demands of other newspapers if they allowed the "Mirror" to be censored.
Foot left the "Standard" in 1945 to join the "Daily Herald" as a columnist. The "Daily Herald" was jointly owned by the Trades Union Congress and Odhams Press, and was effectively an official Labour Party paper. He rejoined "Tribune" as editor from 1948 to 1952, and was again the paper's editor from 1955 to 1960. Throughout his political career he railed against the increasing corporate domination of the press.
Member of Parliament.
Foot fought the Plymouth Devonport constituency in the 1945 general election. His election agent was Labour activist and lifelong friend Ron Lemin. He won the seat for Labour for the first time, holding it until his surprise defeat by Dame Joan Vickers at the 1955 general election. Until 1957, he was the most prominent ally of Aneurin Bevan, who had taken Cripps's place as leader of the Labour left. He successfully urged Bevan to follow through with his threat to resign from the Cabinet in protest of the introduction of prescription charges at the National Health Service, leading to a split in the Labour Party between Bevanites and Gaitskellites. Foot and Bevan fell out after Bevan renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1957 Labour Party conference.
Before the Cold War began in the late 1940s, Foot favoured a 'third way' foreign policy for Europe (he was joint author with Richard Crossman and Ian Mikardo of the pamphlet "Keep Left" in 1947), but in the wake of the communist seizure of power in Hungary and Czechoslovakia he and "Tribune" took a strongly anti-communist position, eventually embracing NATO.
Foot was, however, a critic of the West's handling of the Korean War, an opponent of West German rearmament in the early 1950s and a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957. Under his editorship, "Tribune" opposed both the British government's Suez campaign and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. During this period, he made regular television appearances on the current-affairs programmes "In The News" (BBC Television) and subsequently "Free Speech" (ITV). "There was certainly nothing wrong with his television technique in those days," reflected Anthony Howard shortly after Foot's death.
Foot returned to parliament at a by-election in Ebbw Vale, Monmouthshire, in 1960, the seat having been left vacant by Bevan's death. He had the Labour whip withdrawn in March 1961 after rebelling against the Labour leadership over Royal Air Force estimates. He only returned to the Parliamentary Labour Group in 1963, when Harold Wilson became Leader of the Labour Party after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell.
Harold Wilson — the subject of an enthusiastic campaign biography by Foot published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1964 – offered Foot a place in his first government, but Foot turned it down, instead becoming the leader of Labour's left opposition from the back benches. He opposed the government's moves to restrict immigration, join the European Communities (or "Common Market" as they were referred to) and reform the trade unions, was against the Vietnam War and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, and denounced the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968. He also famously allied with the Tory right-winger Enoch Powell to scupper the government's plan to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers and create a House of Lords comprising only life peers – a "seraglio of eunuchs" as Foot put it.
Foot challenged James Callaghan for the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party in 1967, but failed.
In government.
After 1970, Labour moved to the left and Wilson came to an accommodation with Foot. Foot served in the Second Shadow Cabinet of Harold Wilson in various roles between 1970 and 1974. In April 1972, he stood for the Deputy Leadership of the party, along with Edward Short and Anthony Crosland. The first ballot saw Foot narrowly come second to Short winning 110 votes to the latter's 111. Crosland polled 61 votes and was eliminated. It was reported in the next day's "Glasgow Herald" that Short was the favourite to pick up most of Crosland's votes. The second ballot saw Short increase his total to 145 votes, while Foot's only rose to 116, giving Short victory by 29 votes.
When, in 1974, Labour returned to office under Wilson, Foot became Secretary of State for Employment. According to Ben Pimlott, his appointment was intended to please the left of the party and the Trade Unions. In this role, he played the major part in the government's efforts to maintain the trade unions' support. He was also responsible for the Health and Safety at Work Act, as well as the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act that repealed the Heath ministry's trade union reforms, and the Employment Protection Act, which introduced legal protections against being sacked for becoming pregnant and legislated for maternity pay. His time as Employment Secretary also saw Acas adopt its current name and modern form as a body with independence from government.
Foot was one of the mainstays of the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Communities. When Wilson retired in 1976, Foot contested the party leadership and led in the first ballot, but was ultimately defeated by James Callaghan. Later that year Foot was elected Deputy Leader, and during the Callaghan government Foot took a seat in Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, which gave him the unenviable task of trying to maintain the survival of the Callaghan government as its majority evaporated. However, he was able to steer numerous government proposals through the Commons, often by very narrow majorities, including increases in pension and benefit rates, the creation of the Police Complaints Board, the expansion of comprehensive schools, the establishment of a statutory responsibility to provide housing for the homeless, universal Child Benefit, the nationalisation of shipbuilding, abolishing pay beds in NHS hospitals, and housing security for agricultural workers, before the government fell in a vote of no confidence by a single vote. Whilst Leader of the Commons, Foot simultaneously held the post of Lord President of the Council.
In 1975, Foot, along with Jennie Lee and others, courted controversy when they supported Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, after she prompted the declaration of a state of emergency. In December 1975, "The Times" ran an editorial titled 'Is Mr Foot a Fascist?' — their answer was that he was — after Norman Tebbit accused him of 'undiluted fascism' when Foot said that the Ferrybridge Six deserved dismissal for defying a closed shop.
Labour leadership.
Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan remained as party leader for the next 18 months before he resigned. Foot was elected Labour leader on 10 November 1980, beating Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election (the last leadership contest to involve only Labour MPs). Foot presented himself as a compromise candidate, capable – unlike Healey – of uniting the party, which at the time was riven by the grassroots left-wing insurgency centred around Tony Benn.
The Bennites were demanding revenge for what they considered