Paul Foot - The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined

The Vote

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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PAUL FOOT

How It was Won and

How It was Undermined

VIKING

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PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

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First published 2005
1

Copyright the Estate of Paul Foot, 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Extract from A Cooking Egg by T. S. Eliot (Collected Poems 19091962) reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Every attempt has been made to contact the copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good any errors or omissions in future editions.

Index by Oula Jones

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 9780141901923

Paul Foot completed this book very shortly before his death but had only drafted bibliographic notes for the first chapter. Clare Fermont and John Foot have compiled the chapter-by-chapter bibliography at the end of the text. It is based upon Pauls notes and the books that were in his study.

Part 1:
How the Vote was Won

Part 2:
How the Vote was Undermined

This book was commissioned in 1990, while I was a journalist on the Daily Mirror. It is the culmination of a lifetimes political activity, reading and thought. I joined the Labour Party in Glasgow in 1961, and was immediately shocked at the impotence of Parliament. Even the mildest aspirations of local and national Labour politicians seemed beyond their reach when they were elected to office. This irritation intensified when a Labour government was elected in 1964, and continued to intensify over the next 35 years. Ever since, I have been intrigued by the problem of socialists parliamentary impotence. Why were elected politicians committed to socialist ideas so palpably incapable of putting them into practice? Their legitimacy came from the vote. They were important because they had been elected. The working class was in a majority, and from time to time the workers were likely to elect politicians committed to their interests. Why, when this happened, had elected socialists been so pathetic in office?

Many of my Marxist friends told me that the question was basically irrelevant. Bourgeois democracy was a creature of bourgeois society and therefore could not possibly be expected to buck the market or anything else that was central to that society. This view seemed to me entirely unsatisfactory. It overlooked the fundamental principle of democracy: the consent of the people in whose name their representatives carry out policies. It occurred to me that this rejection of electoral democracy came mainly from people who in varying degrees of certainty supported the tyrannies in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. Yet surely, it seemed to me, democracy, the control of society from below, was the very essence of socialism, and capitalism, the control of industry and finance from above, the very opposite of it.

How to resolve the conflict between a democracy that enfranchises the masses and an economic system that enslaves and exploits them? In an attempt to answer that question, I set out to dig up the roots of representative democracy in Britain. The first half of this book traces the history of universal suffrage, how it was first raised by the Levellers and their supporters in Cromwells New Model Army in the English Revolution, how it vanished off the political map for more than a century and a half, how it was revived in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, and its slow progress through the nineteenth century culminating in the Representation of the People Acts of 1918 and 1929.

The second half of the book assesses how universal suffrage affected the people who most needed it, the working class. It is therefore almost exclusively a story of British Labour. I anticipated, and found, a deep and lasting clash between the forces of property and the elected representatives of the people who had none. I have tried to trace the rises and falls of those clashes, and the way in which they have shaped the conflicting theories of British Labour. I was struck by the constantly recurring theme in the history of British Labour of the conflict between parliamentary or political democracy and economic democracy, and have emphasized the many occasions when this conflict was recognized by Labour politicians and theorists. The experience and the history convinced me even more decisively than when I started that without economic democracy at least some form of democratic control of industry, finance and services then political democracy will always be at the mercy of a greedy and predatory economic hierarchy. Capitalism and democracy, in other words, are hostile to each other, and the continued and continuing failure of British Labour to challenge capitalism has undermined the democracy for which it pretends to stand. Indeed, the net result of a hundred years of compromising with capitalism has ended with New Labour, an allegedly social democratic organization which has surrendered both socialism and democracy.

I have, I hope, been consistently hostile to the view, increasingly fashionable in recent years, that history is made by great men and women, by kings and queens, imperialists and potentates. What matters to me is the response from below, from the people at the bottom of the pile. If they dont respond, history becomes slack and even dull. When they do respond, especially when they revolt, history comes to life. The rise and fall of that response has dictated the structure of the book. It has been drawn by social revolution, what Marx called the locomotive of history: the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution of the eighteenth, the Russian Revolution of the twentieth and several since. A theme that emerges is that the potential for anything worthy of the name of democracy grows with the activity and confidence of the workers and their organizations. When they compromise or slumber in apathy, despair or even affluence, democracy recedes. When they organize themselves into some form of revolt, the prospect for democracy increases.