Hi Graham,
Not a very fair assessment of Paul Foot in my opinion. When you said:
he felt it his duty to make every attempt to uphold the inalienable rights of the 'little man' against those he felt to be responsible for class- and state-repression.
there is a suggestion that this is rather a quaint attitude to adopt. Heaven help us if it is! There was time when the Labour Party existed to do this very thing, back in the days before it bailed out the banking system. The Liberal Party under Joe Grimond also used to adopt a very strong position in defence of the ‘little man.’ Even that party of corporate capital, the Conservative Party, was want to stand up for individual liberty. All of these major political parties at one time clearly operated on the basis that the right of the ‘little man’ was indeed ‘inalienable,’ so if such an idea has become a quaint preserve of the SWP then perhaps it is time the UK electorate examined its moral compass.
Paul Foot was not, so far as I am aware, a man who hated the bourgeoisie. He was middle class himself and so were most of his friends and colleagues. As you probably know it was George Orwell who pointed out that the word ‘bourgeois’ is only ever used as an insult by people who are members of the bourgeoisie themselves! So was Paul Foot a hypocrite?
I don’t think so. He objected to certain values that are associated with a middle-class outlook on life: self-satisfaction, moralizing towards one social inferiors while indulging one’s social superiors, a readiness to accept orthodoxy, cultural philistinism. None of these, to be fair, are attitudes exclusive to the middle class, but are perhaps more clearly observed amongst them. Paul Foot himself represented what many would regard as the better middle-class values: belief in the rule of law; freedom of speech and association; the duty of the citizen to be informed in order to hold power to account. None of this would impair his judgment or make him any more ‘gullible’ than those who accept the official version of the A6 Case.
So far as I am aware Paul Foot never deviated from his belief that James Hanratty was innocent of the A6 murder.
Not a very fair assessment of Paul Foot in my opinion. When you said:
he felt it his duty to make every attempt to uphold the inalienable rights of the 'little man' against those he felt to be responsible for class- and state-repression.
there is a suggestion that this is rather a quaint attitude to adopt. Heaven help us if it is! There was time when the Labour Party existed to do this very thing, back in the days before it bailed out the banking system. The Liberal Party under Joe Grimond also used to adopt a very strong position in defence of the ‘little man.’ Even that party of corporate capital, the Conservative Party, was want to stand up for individual liberty. All of these major political parties at one time clearly operated on the basis that the right of the ‘little man’ was indeed ‘inalienable,’ so if such an idea has become a quaint preserve of the SWP then perhaps it is time the UK electorate examined its moral compass.
Paul Foot was not, so far as I am aware, a man who hated the bourgeoisie. He was middle class himself and so were most of his friends and colleagues. As you probably know it was George Orwell who pointed out that the word ‘bourgeois’ is only ever used as an insult by people who are members of the bourgeoisie themselves! So was Paul Foot a hypocrite?
I don’t think so. He objected to certain values that are associated with a middle-class outlook on life: self-satisfaction, moralizing towards one social inferiors while indulging one’s social superiors, a readiness to accept orthodoxy, cultural philistinism. None of these, to be fair, are attitudes exclusive to the middle class, but are perhaps more clearly observed amongst them. Paul Foot himself represented what many would regard as the better middle-class values: belief in the rule of law; freedom of speech and association; the duty of the citizen to be informed in order to hold power to account. None of this would impair his judgment or make him any more ‘gullible’ than those who accept the official version of the A6 Case.
So far as I am aware Paul Foot never deviated from his belief that James Hanratty was innocent of the A6 murder.
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