Review | The Vote

Danny Bee reviews Paul Foot’s ‘The Vote’ – how it was won and how it’s undermined. The book is available in a new edition by Verso.

During the current general election campaign it is difficult not to ask, ‘what’s this got to do with me?’ There is nothing about wages, nationalisation of the railways and the utility companies, controls on landlords, cancelling PFI debts, scrapping student loans or reducing the ‘cost of living’. There is no plan for peace in Gaza and Ukraine. There is a great deal of vacuous posturing, lying on an industrial scale and much dog whistling from the secretively funded fringe of the right.

At first glance, the vote isn’t much at all. The scratch of a cross with a blunt pencil on a piece of paper. There isn’t a multiple choice option nor the chance to write down what one actually thinks of the local MP or the government. Whatever our ideas about creating a better world they are not formally recorded at the ballot box. But this doesn’t mean that the vote, and the right to vote, are not important, nor is it the case that ‘voting doesn’t change anything’. And as Paul Foot sets out in his magnificent book, The Vote: How it was won and How it was Undermined’ there is much more going on than the briefly scratched cross.

Foot uses a giant canvas on which to paint broad brush strokes of a general history of the fight for the vote since the English Revolution of the 1640s. He then takes a finer brush and adds fascinating details; the Putney Debates of 1647, the disturbances that preceded the Reform Act of 1832, the discussions of the Chartist Convention in 1839, Karl Marx and the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, the strategy and tactics of the Suffragettes.

All the time he blends the colours of these demands for the franchise with the tones and hues of mass political and industrial movements. It is fantastic stuff and an excellent methodology. The way Foot describes the entry of Tom Paine onto the world stage, how he fights in both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, powerfully refutes Edmund Burke and writes one of the most influential books of the English radical tradition, The Rights of Man is historical writing at its very best.

This is the first part of the book; how the vote was won. A key point being that the vote was won, not granted, through endless battles between people who sold their labour to live, and those who owned the means of production and lived off rent, interest and other people’s work.

The second part of the book, ‘….and how it was undermined’ is a much more recent and darker history. Now the picture suggests the final paintings of Goya. Gloomy and disturbing backdrops with only the occasional slashes of light and colour. Foot shows how over and over again, democratically elected Labour Governments, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, are undermined by the money and social power of the capitalists who worked together to defend the interests of capital.

A depressing gang of sordid characters now fill the foreground, figures from a nightmarish vision of Hieronymus Bosch. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Commission, the World Trade Organisation; all unelected and with immense power. Proposed social reform by Labour Governments such as freezing council rents and expanding welfare services were derailed by threats of investment strikes and manipulation of currency markets. All of this accompanied with relentless propaganda of the unelected power of media capitalists including Rupert Murdoch and the Rothermere dynasty of inherited wealth.

As any idea of a parliamentary road to socialism fizzled out with the marketing and middle-management style of Tony Blair, Foot does two things. The first is to point out how New Labour adopted and continued with many Tory policies and how they align with capital rather than labour. This he describes as convergence, and it is easily identified in the current political landscape in Britain. Is this why the numbers voting continues to fall at each election?

The second is to change tack into a seemingly different part of history altogether. He describes the miners strikes of 1972 and 1984. In the latter, whole communities were transformed into an embryonic self-autonomy which suggested a different form of power. He steps further away from the parliamentary chamber and pulls away the cobwebs of history to reveal the workers’ councils in Russia following the October Revolution in 1917. Here he finds the idea again that started at the Putney debates; that political power must be a way to ensure economic power. How else are poverty, injustice, exploitation to be ended? The question will only be answered by an approach to social change which is revolutionary. This must involve the convergence, not of Labour and Tory, but the convergence of a fight for political power with a fight for economic control.

Foot was an active socialist for several decades. A full-time journalist with stints as editor of Socialist Worker and at different times columns in the Daily Mirror, The Guardian and Private Eye. He was also an investigative journalist and worked tirelessly to expose, over and again, the miscarriages of justice and corruption that characterise the capitalist state and the capitalist organisation of production and life. He was also a radical journalist and writes of the radical tradition of Paine and Shelley and Cobbett. He is also part of that radical tradition.

The book races along at such a lively pace it is difficult at times to put down. It has an intriguing ending but let’s not spoil the suspense. I urge you to read the book yourself, for the pleasure of the read, the depth of the history, the liveliness of ideas and the unswerving strength of Foot’s commitment to socialism and democracy from below. I hope you do, and take note of Foot’s conclusion, and join the fight to make the world a better place.