Michael Foot - A man of integrity and honesty

I was devastated to hear of the death of Michael Foot earlier today.
The man was a giant of a figure for those of us in the peace movement and his opposition to nuclear weapons never wavered.

He was a brilliant orator, and an even better author and journalist.
One of my most prized possessions is a signed copy of two volume life of Nye Bevan.

Although I profoundly disagreed with his position on the "Common Market", I respected him on so many different things that I believe one of the most principled and progressive voices on the radical left can genuinely be mourned by almost everyone in the country.

At a time before parliament was televised his speeches made great reading. I thought he was the best person to take over the Labour leadership in 1976 when Harold Wilson stood down.

His leadership of the party came at a particularly difficult time, not helped by the egos of people like David Owen, and although Foot could be particularly cruel to us Liberals. I still retained a fondness for him borne out by the fact that he refused right to the end of taking ANY sort of honour and indeed joining the unelected Second Chamber.

I remember his last speech in the House, when he spoke about the situation in Yugoslavia. He was one of the few to bunk the myth that the Serbs and the Croats had been at each others' throats since time immemorial.
"I do not believe, that the Yugoslav problem represents a recrudescence or revival of what has happened in the area before. Most of the Balkan countries before the Second and the First World Wars were rebelling against foreign imperialism, against outside Governments that tried to impose their will on them. The Austrian Government was the most hated of all; Turkey was another. The people of the Balkans sometimes combined against them.
On top of all the human tragedies taking place in the area we must number the tragedy of the fact that Croats and Serbs have begun fighting each other at all. It is not as if they have often fought before or have just been waiting for a chance to start fighting each other. At times they combined to resist Austrian and then German imperialism, not to mention Turkish imperialism".

He was a Republican, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, we are all that little bit diminished today.