Michael Foot Quotes

[The constituency will be certain to return a socialist candidate] and this will help gain a socialist majority in the Commons and help Britain on the way to becoming a socialist republic.

The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

It is a justifiable proposition that every wave of immigration we have had into this country has benefited this country.

I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again.

[T]he England of the Conservative Party...condoned Fascism, consorted with Fascism, connived at imperialist war, abandoned any hope of building a sane and secure international society... Yet there was still another England. This other England detested Fascism from the day of its birth. It fought against the betrayal of Abyssinia. It denounced the policy which led to the massacre of Spain. It struggled in opposition throughout those years to build an international society and it understood that the chief enemy which must be fought was Fascism in whatever guise it might appear and in whatever land it might capture the apparatus of the State. This was the England of the Left, the England of Labour, the England which inherited and adapted to the modern age the European policy which made this country the leader of the nations in the nineteenth century. This England made errors too, but they were errors of a quite different nature from those crimes committed by the men who believed they could reach comfortable terms of settlement with the forces of Fascism which threatened to engulf the continent in a new Dark Ages... It was the resurrection of this other England which saved the world, and the hopes of the European revolution which must follow the defeat of our enemies on the battlefield will depend on which England rules as the fighting subsides.

It is all the more necessary that we should prevent an extension of the powers of the European Assembly, however it may be elected. I have been opposed to the extension of those powers, and I remain so. ... We must preserve every precious part of the power that we retain in the House.

It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it.

If the Government say they are going to ram through this measure to reduce the power of the Commons it would be scandalous. It is one of the most shameful frauds ever perpetrated. It would break the control between government and the people and this would inflict serious injury on our democratic institutions. If they do that we will be nearer the day when people will say 'All right, let us settle things by violence'.

In the Labour movement they said they would have no truck with coalition, but if Britain stayed in the EEC then for decades to come they would be enmeshed in various forms of coalition government than ever before. That was the most important issue of all. If in Britain the people did not like a government they could vote it out of office, but they had no similar recourse in the case of the institutions of the EEC, which had supreme powers and which were undemocratic.

The revolt against imperialism in the Colonies, therefore, even when it takes on a nationalistic form, is a revolt against British capitalism and colonial peoples in revolt must be looked upon by a Socialist movement in Great Britain as allies in the fight against the common enemy. This theory is fully developed in Stalin's Marxism and the National Question. The methods by which the Soviet Government has dealt with colonial peoples reveal a real basis for co-operation with so-called backward peoples as soon as the power of capitalism within the imperialist nation has been effectively broken.

The consequences of withdrawal from the EEC had been exaggerated: he did not accept that Britain's problems could be solved only by our accepting an alien system whose legislative basis – the European Communities Act 1972 – it was to proposed to change. Policies which had stood Britain in good stead, for example on agriculture and the Commonwealth, had already been destroyed by attempts over the last decade to join the EEC. Continued membership would lead to the dismembering of the United Kingdom, and of the authority of Parliament which had already lost much of its power in EEC affairs. If we remained in the Community the seat of power would lie in future in permanent coalition in Brussels.

If only my hon. Friend would conduct the novel experiment of listening with his ears instead of his voice, a whole new world would open to him.

President de Gaulle is a rebel against American leadership. Some of us who are also rebels have some sympathy with him on that account. ... [O]ne of his long-term aims is to secure a settlement between East and West in Europe. ... The whole situation is altering between East and West. The planet is trembling with alterations and differences in alliances and arrangements. I do not believe in the old configuration of the cold war. ... It is out of date. It is five years, even ten years, out of date. ... [W]e may, whatever may have been his motives and reasons, thank President de Gaulle for doing for us what the British Government had not the courage and energy to do for themselves.

[W]e are in for fierce and angry times in this country.

They had been told that those political disabilities, the delegations from our sovereignty and the dismemberment of Britain's parliamentary institutions, must be accepted because of economic circumstances; that there was no choice. But [I] did not believe that. I hope the message which will go out from this conference to our movement up and down the country is, 'Do not let this great Labour movement be afraid of those who tell us that we cannot run our own affairs, that we have not the ingenuity to mobilize our resources and overcome our economic problems'. Of course we have, and we can save our democratic freedom at the same time.