The Vote: How It Was Won And How It Was Undermined
By Paul Foot
Viking (Penguin) 2005
506 pages
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
Paul Foot, who died in July 2004, began this ambitious book in 1990, and completed it shortly before his death, having been disabled by a life-threatening illness in 1999. The book is, as Foot puts it in his introduction, "the culmination of a lifetime's political activity, reading and thought".
The first half of the book recounts the long struggle for universal suffrage in Britain between the 17th and 20th centuries. The second half, in a close examination of Labour governments in office, attempts to answer the question "Why were elected politicians committed to socialist ideas so palpably incapable of putting them into practice?" This question is pressing since, as Foot points out, "Their legitimacy came from the vote. They were important because they had been elected. 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?"
Anyone suffering from the liberal delusion that there is some intrinsic dynamic towards democracy within capitalism would do well to study Foot's account of the centuries-long battle for universal suffrage. In a series of gripping and extremely well-written chapters, Foot recounts how every small advance towards the universal franchise had to be wrested from the ruling class by extra-parliamentary struggle, from the agitation in the Cromwellian "New Model Army", the influence of radical writers such as Thomas Paine, the huge Chartist movement and demonstrations of the 1830s and '40s, the pressure from below driving the various Reform Bills of the 19th century, through to the Suffragette movement's campaign for the right to vote for women and the eventual granting of universal suffrage in 1929.
Foot's interest, though, is not primarily historical: his main concern is in the "unstable compound" of capitalism and democracy and its effects on the various Labour administrations elected in Britain in the 20th century, from Ramsay Macdonald's minority governments of the 1920s, through the post-World War II majority governments of Clement Attlee and the 1964-70 and 1974-79 governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, to the current "New Labour" rule under Tony Blair.
The term "unstable compound" is taken from R.H. Tawney, one of the leading theoreticians of the British Labour Party in the first half of the 20th century, who wrote: "That democracy and extreme economic inequality form, when combined, an unstable compound, is no novel doctrine ... Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should, not only a form of government but a type of society. To make it a type of society requires ... the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority".
Tawney sums this up in a striking metaphor, "Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a tiger paw by paw: vivisection is its trade and it does the skinning first".
Tawney's message to Labour was clear: either skin the capitalist tiger or it will skin you. By looking in depth at post-war British Labour governments, Foot shows in detail how in the "unstable compound" it is capitalism that prevails, and that the reason why elected Labour governments have been so pathetic in office is that they failed to extend the political democracy won in the battles for the universal franchise into the industrial and economic domains.
Foot's views on the Labour Party are not always convincing. For one thing, despite his criticisms of Labour, he underplays the role it played in helping the US spread "anti-communism", and although he mentions some of Labour's reactionary foreign policies, such as taking Britain into the Korean War on the side of the US, the sale of British military ships to Pinochet following the coup that deposed the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, or the arms sales to the military dictatorship in Greece following the 1967 coup, he fails to mention the role that Wilson's Labour government played in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians and the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965-66. Indeed, "Indonesia" doesn't even make it into the index.
At the end of the book Foot describes as an abject failure the idea "that a new egalitarian and democratic world society can be created bit by bit through institutions established and tolerated by the society it seeks to replace". Despite this, Foot concludes on an optimistic note, "Revolution from above is nonsense. Revolution from below remains an enticing possibility and is worth fighting for. The seeds of the new society can only be sown in the struggle against the old one."
Despite sometimes underplaying the systematic role the Labour Party played in propping up British imperialism and aiding US tyranny, Paul Foot's final book is an impressive and fitting testament to a life spent engaged in that struggle, and deserves to be read and studied by all socialists.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 24, 2006.
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