Michael Foot: friend of Friends
David Boulton recalls Mochael Foot's quaker links
In the many tributes to Michael Foot, who died last week, few writers thought his Quaker education at Leighton Park School worth more than a passing mention. At his ninetieth birthday party six years ago, I asked how it had influenced him. ‘What I learned from the Quakers’, he told me, ‘was the faith that by putting ideas and action together you can change the world. That made me a humanist.’ But not a Quaker? ‘Well’, he replied with a chuckle, ‘isn’t humanism just Quakerism without the other-worldly bits?’ Michael famously had a pantheon of heroes ranging from Milton and Paine to Hazlitt and Nye Bevan. Among them was Gerrard Winstanley, True Leveller in the 1640s and a member of Westminster Monthly Meeting in the 1670s. In his foreword to my book Gerrard Winstanley and the republic of heaven Foot wrote that ‘Winstanley’s “enabling dream” is not fixed and confined in a romantic past but remains relevant today, despite all the convulsive changes of the intervening centuries’. Winstanley’s passionate insistence that ‘action is the life of all’ sums up Foot’s own life-long commitment to what he called ‘the politics of paradise’.
And I recall his response to the frequent jibe of his enemies that his unswerving advocacy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, coupled with a radical redistribution of wealth and power, made him a dangerous extremist: ‘If you want to meet a really dangerous extremist, look no further than Jesus!’
Michael Foot, son of a liberal Methodist and Quaker-educated, has his own distinguished place in the long, honourable and beautiful tradition of radical religious and political dissent. He was no Friend, but he was a friend of Friends, a fellow-traveller in seeking the politics of paradise in both word and deed.
Michael Foot’s funeral is at Golders Green crematorium (London) on Monday 15 March at 2pm, with a relay to an outside screen.
