A blind faith in absolutes that blurred vision of reality

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS WEEKEND, comrades of the late Paul Foot – including his uncle Michael Foot, Tony Benn and John Pilger – will gather at a rally to celebrate his life. Their message will be, as Pilger wrote in The New Statesman: “Paul was the supreme journalist he was largely because of his socialism.”

Foot’s journalism and politics were linked - just not in the way Pilger supposes. Obituarists who treated Foot’s Marxism as an idiosyncrasy were mistaken, but the error was generous. When campaigning against specific injustices (including numerous wrongful convictions) or corrupt businessmen, Foot was formidable; on other issues, his writings were enfeebled by dogmatism.

Tributes to Foot made little discrimination among those causes, and so praised his campaign to exonerate James Hanratty, executed for the A6 murder. But Hanratty was guilty: the science of DNA has resolved this once-intractable case. In 1999, Foot claimed in Private Eye that DNA evidence in the Hanratty case was unreliable owing to possible contamination. Yet he later conceded in a BBC interview: “I’m a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from … a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say, well, that clashes with my belief that he didn’t commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science.”

This is the credo of the biblical creationist confronted with geological evidence of the age of the Earth. Whatever it was initially, Foot’s campaign became an idée fixe, impervious to reason and indifferent to the sensibilities of Hanratty’s surviving victim.

Foot’s political writings displayed similar weaknesses. Against individual politicians, he deflated the overrated and harried the dishonest. He presciently observed in The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969) that, on immigration, Powell “had embarked on one of the most dangerous and opportunist escapades in the history of British politics”. But on matters of state, Foot’s analyses rarely extended beyond caricature. The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968) depicted a Prime Minister bamboozled by the City into abandoning social reform and “the cheeky language with which Wilson had, on occasions, mocked the received doctrines of the Bank of England, and sterling speculators”. When a government borrows money, potential lenders have good economic reasons for being interested in the terms of repayment, and not just because it is “received doctrine” that they should be.

Foot’s Marxism was strikingly uncritical. In Why You Should be a Socialist (1977) he declared: “Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite.” In The Case for Socialism (1990), this preposterous judgement became: “The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘dictator’ cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible.”

This is like citing the 1936 Soviet constitution as proof of Stalin’s libertarianism. The State and Revolution depicts a democratic post-revolutionary order, all right, but that was not what Lenin created. It never could have been, because Lenin envisaged a social unity in which “all take part in the administration of the state”. He had no concept of opposition; when popular opposition did arise, he annihilated it.

In Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (1989), Foot maintained that severing the Union would cause Ulster Protestants to “demand - and create - a carnival of peace, prosperity and progress, North and South”. Unabashed in cliché and facile in argument, Foot was not long exercised by the prospect of civil war and bloody repartition.

Foot’s Guardian columns after 9/11 exhibited relentless casuistry. In October 2001, he asserted: “Appeasement of Israel has been the lynchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East, and is obviously connected, at whatever distance, to the terrorist attacks on September 11.” At whatever distance. I must remember that formulation the next time I’m challenged to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Of course there is some connection between Western policy on Israel and Islamist terrorism, for Israel is a Jewish state and al-Qaeda urges holy war on Jews. Yet for Foot the notion that Jihadists pursue not remediable grievances but the destruction of Western civilisation was literally incomprehensible. With unintended irony he declared, after listing his own complaints about the international order: “That doesn’t excuse the fanatical and suicidal terrorism of September 11. But it helps to explain it.” It helps in no respect whatever; Foot’s “explanation” for theocratic barbarism was a conceptual as well as moral evasion.

In March 2002, Foot wrote: “Anyone …who denies the right of violent resistance to the Palestinians is siding unequivocally with the oppressor against the oppressed.” Those who consider Foot a stylish writer should reflect on that enervating euphemism. A just Israeli-Palestinian peace assuredly requires denying “the right of violent resistance” to the suicide-bombers of buses and restaurants, and asserting the necessity of politics alone.

What caused the occlusion of Foot’s critical powers? A hint is provided in his panegyric Red Shelley (1980): “Our world, like [the poet Shelley’s] world, needs agitators. People’s aspirations need to be lifted and guided into action.” An advocate of guidance by external agency would find something familiar in Shelley’s assertion that the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered”.

Perceiving how things ought to be is the reformer’s enduring concern. Discovering laws by which things ought to be ordered is, as the Shelley critic Simon Haines observes, a dangerous additional step. Paul Foot, hagiographer of Lenin, took it with zeal.