Michael Foot Quotes

There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate

We've got to win it. We're in it. Politically it is impossible for anybody to withdraw. The British people would not stand it. We have got to beat Hitler... Chamberlain is not a war man. He's a man of peace. His heart is not in the war. The only hope is to put Churchill in charge and get rid of Chamberlain.

He's passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever.

I have respect for the history of this House. There is nothing reprehensible in people recalling that some of the liberties of the people of this country enshrined in this House go back not merely to the conflicts of the seventeenth century, which will certainly apply to many of the matters with which we have to deal—the power over taxation which resides, or is still to reside, in this House—but to the controversies which prevailed in the House of Commons during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. If people say to me that all these are remote, old-fashioned ideas, I reply that they are as up-to-date as the ideas that brought the Labour Party into being.

We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership

[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.

I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering...I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside...what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.

What we are doing is to ensure that for the next 20, 30 or 40 years the constitutional balance will be heavily weighted on the side of reaction, the elderly and the Establishment, those who in the main have exhausted the contribution which they can make to the political life of the country and who wish to sustain all the old institutions.

When I was a small boy, following the affairs of the House of Commons as closely as I could, I asked my father what a Royal Commission was. He said, "It is a broody hen sitting on a china egg".

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.

I oppose Britain's entry into the rich nations' club, sometimes called the Common Market... In the interests of British democracy, of the health of our economy; in the interests of Wales and our fight against a return of unemployment; in the interests of a wider peace in Europe and links with countries in the Commonwealth, I believe Britain should keep out of this narrowly conceived, Little-European Common Market.

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

If the Common Market Bill goes through, Parliament will have been deprived of some of the essential instruments for planning the nation's economy.

<small>THE ARMAMENTS RACE IN EUROPE MUST BE STOPPED NOW.</small> ... I am not in favour of going to war in order to defend the Foreign Investments of British financiers, or the protective tariffs of British industrialists. ... I am a young man. I appeal to the Youth of the Monmouth Division to consider what the world offers to our generation. <small>WAR</small> and <small>POVERTY</small> are the twin dangers which threaten our chances of a decent, happy life in the World. All over Europe youth is being recruited into the ranks of Fascism. Fascism represents the last attempt of those who control economic power to maintain their supremacy. ... <small>I WANT TO SEE A GOVERNMENT IN THIS COUNTRY WHICH WILL SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE DESERVING MANY, AND NOT THOSE OF THE WEALTHY FEW.</small>

Parliament (by which I mean, of course, the elected House of Commons stripped of all irresponsible encumbrances) is the institution which has played the central, liberating role in our history ever since Cromwellian or even Elizabethan times; no comparable institution certainly has shaped so continuously the life and society of any Western European state. It is the authority of our distinctive Parliament which is one of the stakes in the choice now before the people.