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 … - Michael Foot
" "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.
About Michael Foot
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.
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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.