Paul Foot

Paul Foot (° Haïfa, Palestine, 1936 - * Stansted, Great Britain, 2004) is militant a trotskist English, member of the Socialist Workers Party (Great Britain), known of the general public for its regular chronicles in the national press (The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, Private Eye), its political biographies (Labor the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the preserving deputy anti-immigration Enoch Powell…) and its judicial enquiries (whose several revealed important miscarriage of justices).

Foot was often invited of a radio program of the BBC where he commented on the topicality (“Any Questions”) and the regular organizer of an emission of commercial television where he made a press review (“What the Papers Say”). He was briefly editor association of the weekly magazine Socialist Worker and its writings for this newspaper and monthly magazine of its party, Socialist Review , cover four decades. He was elected twice journalist of the year and once journalist of the decade (in 2000) by his pars. He was member of the national union of journalists (NUJ).

Paul Foot, born in 1936 in Palestine then under British mandate (his/her father was the representative of the British government), belonged to a remarkable political family. A grandfather was appointed Liberal party, his diplomatic father and ambassador of Great Britain, an uncle Minister for Labor justice and another uncle member of the House of Lords. Nearer to him politically (but the difference was of size) was his/her other uncle Michael Foot - militant pacifist, deputy of the left wing of the Workers party and briefly leader of the party.

Paul Foot, who learned the journalistic profession in Glasgow then, adhered to the revolutionary socialism and International Socialists, ancestor of the current SWP, following discussions with the founder of this political tendency, Tony Cliff, author in particular of an important book, the Capitalism of State in Russia .

An inimitable speaker (the combination of its middle-class accent, its corrosive humor characteristic of the Schools Public and of its university of Oxford, and its trotskism was irresistible), Foot often represented his party at the time of the great national demonstrations and discussed with representatives of other tendencies of the British left wing. Extremely rare fact, it was popular with all the militants who crossed it, some are their political differences, as testify the many homages which were published after its death of an heart attack in 2004 (Tariq Ali, John Pilger, Tony Ben, etc).

It gave conferences on subjects as various as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, of which he was the author of a political biography, Red Shelley , the leader of the revolt of the slaves in Saint-Domingue, All Saints' day Louverture, Northern Ireland, the author George Orwell, immigration and racism and the fight for the right to vote (the subject of its last book) - conferences which were followed and appreciated at the same time by students and the public usual militant, trade unionists and listeners little accustomed to the political meetings.

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Its writings

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