Paul Anderson, review of Words As Weapons by Paul Foot
(Verso, £9.95), Tribune, 23 November 1990
“For many years," writes Paul Foot in the introduction
to Words As Weapons, "I have
castigated friends and relations (including my revered uncle Michael) who have
published volumes of journalistic excerpts. Journalism, my argument ran, is by
its nature ephemeral. Then Robin Blackburn of Verso wrote to me asking if I
would be willing to publish a volume of excerpts from my own journalism. At once,
I began to see the argument in an entirely different light..."
It's a good job he did. The argument that journalism
doesn't bear collection is weak - what about George Orwell or James Cameron? -
and Foot's journalism deserves to be put between covers if anyone's does. His
weekly page in the Daily Mirror is a
model of popular campaigning journalism, and his polemical column in Socialist Worker has long been the only
good reason to buy the paper. His extended review articles for the London Review of Books, usually on some
unsung scandal or another, have shone even in the distinguished company they
keep.
Nearly everything in Words
As Weapons comes from the eighties, and most of it is from Socialist Worker and the LRB, with a sprinkling from the Mirror, the New Statesman and elsewhere. All the pieces are worth reading for
their style and construction (the' book would make an excellent text for
trainee journalists), but it is the longer articles from the LRB that really
stand out.
Foot is a great teller of complex stories, and the
2,000-words-plus that the LRB's
editor, Karl Miller, allows his writers has been used by Foot to great effect.
Virtually everything here from the LRB,
but particularly the articles on the Westland affair and the long-running saga
of communist infiltration of Britain's security services, is as fresh as when
it was written.
Foot is at his weakest when writing from the left on the
Labour Party. He is often quite rightly damning about the prospects of
parliamentary reformism, and he's delightfully rude about Labour and trade
union leaders. But he doesn't really have anything to offer as an alternative.
He is, of course, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, and is certainly
its most effective speaker. Yet, although there are plenty of rhetorical calls
for "socialism" and "revolution", Foot gives few clues
about what he wants or how it could come about. There is certainly nothing here
to convince anyone that his own tiny authoritarian Leninist sect could
organise much more than a piss-up in the top room of a real-ale pub.
But perhaps that doesn't matter. As Robert Maxwell has
found, it's possible to get a lot out of Foot even if you treat his Trotskyist
politics as harmless.
