What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for… - Michael Foot
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What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them
Michael Mackintosh Foot (23 July 1913 – 3 March 2010) was a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his working life as a journalist on Tribune and the Evening Standard and co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym. Foot served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1955 and again from 1960 until he retired in 1992. A passionate orator, and associated with the left wing of the Labour Party for most of his career, Foot was an ardent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and of British withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC). He was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment under Harold Wilson in 1974, and later served as Leader of the House of Commons (1976–1979) under James Callaghan. He was also Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under Callaghan from 1976 to 1980.
We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership
Socialism with its ideal of the national control of consumption and production, its substitution of national barter for the processes of foreign trade, is by no means an international force. ... It looks inwards rather than outwards and sets up a national economy, which every true protectionist should envy. Russia is a powerful national state and has indulged in nationalist policies. ... Even a Socialist state cannot provide against war unless a world authority has been formed.
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Even the victor in a just cause is susceptible to the passions which war arouses. Every inhuman feeling is at once exacerbated. Truth, decency, morality, justice are the first casualties in any war. The accumulated effect makes a just settlement impossible. ... The pacifist treasures justice, liberty; but he believes that they can only be lastingly secured by peaceable means and that the use of force will only contaminate them. ... Armaments themselves provide an independent cause of war owing to the suspicion and fear which they breed. ... Unilateral disarmament offers the only way to escape once the policy of collateral disarmament has failed.
