Foot mythology runs out

So expert have we become at sanitising public figures when they die that their real significance is routinely lost in a haze of recycled clichés and dubious received wisdom. That is now the lot of Michael Foot, as we are regaled with images of his stick-waving geniality on Hampstead Heath, duffle coat and shock of white hair at the Cenotaph and all-round otherworldliness as Labour's bibliophile leader in the depths of the party's early 1980s civil war.

In fact, he seemed a man from another age when he was elected to the job, in his late 60s, and was certainly entirely unsuited to head a major political party in a televisual age.

But the widespread warmth towards Foot is also genuine. He really was a man of integrity and decency. Foot is a figure, after all, whose life spanned the greatest conflicts of the last century and who would casually reminisce about meeting George Orwell and the communist leader Harry Pollitt in the Tribune magazine offices to plan a united front against fascism in the late 1930s. What we hear less of is that Foot also made many of the right calls during those years, unlike the British and often Labour establishments — from the "guilty men" of appeasement and the defence of the Spanish republic to the cold war, the nuclear weapons threat, Vietnam and Iraq.

It is with Foot as an emblem of the folly of the left and the dead end of Labour radicalism that the real mythology kicks in. In New Labour's version of history, the sensible if tired administration of Jim Callaghan was brought down by mindless trade unionists, who then made common cause with a leftist Labour insurgency headed by Tony Benn. This unholy alliance took over the party and met its Waterloo under Foot's leadership and the banner of the "longest suicide note in history" manifesto in the disastrous election defeat of 1983.

By the time Callaghan took over in 1976, the western world's economies were tanking, the cabinet majority decided to go to the IMF and impose the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s and the prime minister informed the Labour conference that governments could no longer spend their way out of recessions. Post-war social democracy was in crisis and the choice was either to go for more radical forms of intervention or lurch towards pre-Thatcherite monetarism.

Deepest wage cuts

A demoralised Labour right opted for the latter and forced through three years of the deepest real wage cuts in modern British history. The good work in government done by ministers such as Foot, in employment and union rights, or Benn, in taking public ownership of North Sea oil, was overwhelmed by the impact of such an attack on the living standards of Labour's core supporters.

They also paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's election and a determination across the Labour party to prevent a repeat of such self-destructive folly by making its leaders more accountable. That in turn led to the bitter internal struggle between a left and right divided on everything. Foot was naturally unable to bridge the divide and in effect became a prisoner of Labour's dominant right wing, showing them a loyalty they never repaid. And the party's 1983 manifesto was certainly incoherent.

Two other factors were far more important. The first was the Falklands war, which transformed Thatcher's poll ratings on a wave of jingoism (and was unwisely given unqualified support by Foot). The second was the schism in Labour and the breakaway of part of its leadership to form the media-feted Social Democratic party, which split the anti-Conservative vote and kept Britain's most socially destructive post-war prime minister in power for the rest of the decade.

Foot in many ways epitomised Labour left's traditional weaknesses: its lack of rootedness among the party's social base, its reluctance to focus on the real centres of power in society and its preference for moral stands over strategic programmes and alliances.

But to insist that the Foot experience demonstrates no party can be elected on an unequivocally left-of-centre platform, is clearly absurd. Thatcher claimed New Labour as her greatest achievement, but already events have driven Gordon Brown's government to adopt social democratic measures branded as extreme in the early 1980s. The scale of continuing economic crisis means that agenda will have to be taken further, whatever the result of the election.

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.