Not long before he died in 2004, Paul Foot wrote an obituary of his friend Tony Cliff, with whom he worked for many years on the Socialist Worker. “Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration.”
Foot, a prolific writer for nearly half a century for the Daily Mirror, Private Eye, Socialist Worker and latterly the Guardian, wasn’t guilty of that aberration either. Margaret Renn’s biography reveals the posh old Trot hack with the dodgy hair to be something we desperately need but arguably lack today: an unbiddable socialist journalist adept at investigating stories about ordinary people fitted up for crimes they didn’t commit, and implacable in indicting governments for getting their snouts in the trough while the people they represent are systematically betrayed. Foot was, Guardian readers will recall, especially good on New Labour’s ruin of public housing and hospitals via the private finance initiative.
