WARNING: This book will change your life.

That might sound like a rather grandiose claim, but it is equally difficult, as one who has read it, to believe that any sentient human being could be unaffected by this polemic. Paul Foot, as one would expect, write with an assuredness and conviction that needs no jingoism. He paints a history that joins the dots of politics that I already had, to create a testable historic background taking us up to the beginning of the 21st century.

'The Vote' is written in two sections, 'How It Was Won' and 'How It Was Undermined'. When I purchased it, I had thought that I had a fair knowledge of the first section and that, a swift skim would suffice to take me to the meat of the second instalment: WRONG! Foot, not only links the struggle for a universal suffrage, he adds bits that were missed from my political education. There were times, whilst reading this, that I was forced to break off and check the historical accuracy of his claims. Each time, I found that my understanding was incorrect and that his interpretation was backed up by history.

'How It Was Undermined' is also a hard read. It must have been tempting to cast a nebulous 'establishment' as the baddie and turn this part of the book into a personal harangue; telling the reader to 'do as I say' and all will be well. Foot avoids this and, again, sticks to facts. The outcome is that there is no silver bullet on offer. The struggle for true democracy must continue and, this book means that no serious protagonist now has any excuse to be caught by surprise at the tactics which will be used to keep the powerful in their ascendancy.

Needless to say, this book is a MUST read... ( )

The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined is the magnificent parting gift and last political testament of Paul Foot, champion of the poor and disinherited, a tireless campaigner against injustice and the‘ most seductive socialist revolutionary of his generation'.

The book was commissioned in 1990 while Foot still worked for the Daily Mirror as an investigative journalist (he left in disgust at the paper’s anti-union position soon afterwards) and was completed shortly before his death in 2004. It is as Foot notes in the book’s introduction, ‘the culmination of a lifetime’s political activity, reading and thought.’

Ever since Foot started work as a cub reporter in Glasgow in the early sixties and came into contact with the realities of working class life (he joined the International Socialists/ Socialist Workers Party in 1962) he began questioning ‘why elected politicians ostensibly committed to socialist ideas were incapable of putting them into practice’.

The scion of a famous family of politicians and establishment figures Foot was perfectly placed to start asking and answering the question that continued to trouble, exercise and irritate him throughout a lifetime of socialist activism; namely how to resolve the contradiction of a democracy that enfranchises the masses with political representation and an economic system that continues to enslave and exploit them on a global level, basically unchecked.

The rejoinder from some Marxists, who Foot believed gave uncritical support to tyrannies in Russia, China and elsewhere, that ‘bourgeoisie democracy’ was an irrelevance, struck him as unsatisfactory. In his view democracy ‘the control of society from below, was the very essence of socialism,’ and something worth fighting for while ‘capitalism, the control of industry and finance from above,’ was its antithesis and negation.

In an article written in 2000 and entitled Democracy and Socialism: Century of the Great Hope, Foot explained with reference to the German Social Democratic Party and British Labour how the prospect of peaceful social revolution that had seemed inevitable at the turn of the century was an illusion because the fight for the vote did not ultimately challenge economic power. Tragically history shows that this failure ended with ‘the century of great hope becoming the century of the Holocaust.’

Foot concluded in this article that the ‘enduring political lesson of the C20th is that socialism and social democracy through the ballot box have failed’ and that socialism cannot be delivered by the rulers of class society however enlightened they may claim to be. A gradual tinkering to transform capitalism was never going to succeed because capital would violently resist any and every measure that threatened its wealth, privilege and power.

In The Vote Foot expanded his thoughts on the deep and lasting conflict between political democracy and capitalist economic power with an immensely detailed investigation into the roots of representative democracy in Britain and the people’s struggle, often savagely repressed, to bring it about.

The first half of the book starts with the great debates at Putney in 1647 where the idea of universal suffrage and even economic equality were first raised in an organised fashion and where at first, before the men of property reasserted their power, the radical and emancipating ideas of civilian Levellers were reinforced with the might and discontent of a bloodied army.

When the heady days of ‘a world turned upside down’ came to an end with the Restoration and counter revolution of Charles II, Foot describes how subsequent generations were reawakened to these ineradicably attractive egalitarian ideals.

There follows an excellent chapter on the Chartist movement whose demand for the vote and associated parliamentary reforms was only part of a broader struggle for the emancipation of the working class. This mass movement was ultimately defeated by the propertied forces of reaction although not before scaring the wits out of the ‘great and good.’ Many Chartist agitators and rank and file were gaoled, transported or hanged.

In succeeding chapters Foot demonstrates how the right to vote was not won by voting for it. All the various reforms only came after sustained mass rallies, strikes, riots and sometimes insurrection. Rather than face social revolution and have their extorted power and privilege swept away the ruling class reluctantly began to yield heavily qualified voting rights. By the end of the C19th even the most ‘clapped-out reactionaries’ realised that further concessions of the franchise might actually legitimise their power and thus prevent militant agitation from assuming further revolutionary character.

Although Foot had a great fondness and respect for Tony Cliff, in the longest chapter about female enfranchisement he disagrees with Cliff’s assertion that the attainment of votes for woman had very little to do with the actions of militant suffragettes. While the social revolution of 1914-1918 was undoubtedly instrumental in this regard and woman in New Zealand were granted the vote in 1892 without much ado, Foot convincingly argues that it was the courageous and militant struggle of radical feminist socialists that was the driving force of this victory.

And so, the first half of this history culminates with the Representation of the People Acts of 1918 and 1929 and the widely held belief that finally the welfare of the vast majority would be realised by a Labour government with a mandate.

In the following chapters Foot assesses how representative democracy failed the people it was supposed to liberate and how the Labour party, despite some worthy achievements (Labour governments facilitated the construction of 14 million houses at affordable rents, established the NHS and introduced comprehensive education), became the servant of capital rather than its master.

Foot has nothing but gleeful contempt for the union bureaucrats and social democratic careerist politicians who failed to tame Tawney’s ‘capitalist tiger’ especially Jimmy Thomas, the railways union leader, who was instrumental in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory during the great general strike of 1926, swooned in the ‘aristocratic embrace’ as a government minister and ended up trading budget secrets with his cronies in the stock exchange.

But in reality even when elected on a swell of socialist conviction as in 1945 and later under Wilson and Callaghan, Labour was never able to deliver the goods. In 1964 Wilson discovered who really ruled when Lord Cromer the Governor of the Bank of England admitted that ‘the economic dictation of those who wielded economic power’ would not permit the Labour party to implement their mandate.

As Foot wrote in the ‘Century of Great Hope’, ‘both governments trailed helplessly behind the economic priorities of capitalism: if the market called for high unemployment the government conceded it; if the market called for low investment, the government conceded it; if the market called for cuts in public services the government conceded them. Yet no one elected the market.’ And of course unaccountable servants of the ruling class, particularly in MI5, did their very best to destabilise Labour governments throughout the seventies.

The effect of this sobering reality and the ‘relentless drain of democracy’ led to the great betrayal by New Labour under Blair who jettisoned the socialist platform of Clause 4 and any last vestige of social democratic principles.

Although Foot demonstrates that parliamentary democracy is impotent in the grip of undemocratic capitalist institutions and laments the apathy generated by long years of corruption and ‘parliamentary cretinism’ he concludes his magnificent history by reminding us that alongside the evidence of why socialists must reject the parliamentary road of gradualism we can be inspired by the book’s secondary theme of resistance from below.

Even though the latter half of the book is at times unremittingly grim the final chapter 'Their Democracy and Ours' is an inspiration for all those who aspire and strive towards a truly democratic and egalitarian world for despite the pessimism engendered by the failed project of revolution from above, the subterranean fire of militant resistance alongside socialist organisation may yet deliver ‘the greatest possible democratic achievement: the emancipation of labour.’

I hope that this great work of socialist history finds as wide a readership as possible. Though specifically concerned with the British experience, readers elsewhere can draw their own conclusions and be encouraged and assured that even if the revolution is delayed for a lifetime, a socialist’s place is fighting for it amongst the workers, the poor and the dispossessed. ( )

http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2006/12/paul-foot-vote.html ( )