You see to me, with all the tax stuff and benefit stuff it's all about pitting normal peep

against normal peeps. I claim benefits but then I can't go out the house without my brothers or father. I hear things and those 'things' will never go away. For normal people, what would you do if you couldn't feel anything, nothing at all, as in you could burn yourself. See it's impossible to explain. Anyway, got me thinking about politicians, they aren't all the same, here are words about my Uncle, and I bet loads of wrathers will have loved and been to Africa, sorry about the rant, getting all nervous and thinking...

Unsung hero of Europe's relationship with Africa
Kaye Whiteman
Friday 22 February 2002 01.54 GMT
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Both at Westminster and in Brussels, Maurice Foley, who has died aged 76, had an under-appreciated impact on Britain's relations with Africa, especially during the Nigerian civil war and in regard to the arrangements for Commonwealth countries in the wake of Britain's entry into Europe. He was influential in building a European development policy, and helped ensure that the then European Community was in the vanguard of changes in southern Africa.
Born in Billingham, Co Durham, Foley was educated at St Mary's College, Middlesbrough, and at 16 went to work as an electrician at ICI. He came from an Irish working-class family that had found work in the Durham mines and this, and his Roman Catholicism, were powerful, lifelong influences.

His political teeth were cut in the rough and tumble of the communist-dominated Electrical Trades Union, then in the more centrist Transport and General Workers' Union. He worked fulltime for the Young Christian Workers, and travelled widely in the developing world for the World Assembly of Youth.

Although a convinced anti-communist, Foley resisted the rightwing label. He was elected to parliament for Labour in the 1963 West Bromwich byelection, and the following year got a junior post in George Brown's new Department of Economic Affairs. As junior minister at the Home Office after 1966, with responsibility for immigration, he often had to defend briefs that ran against his broad sympathy with immigrant populations. In 1967, he made a positive impact as junior minister for the navy, and received a further career boost with two years at the Foreign Office.

I first encountered him at the end of the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s, when, as minister for Africa, he had stuck his neck out in support of the federal government. Some members of his own party found this advocacy embarrassing but, when Nigerian reconciliation proved him right, he showed characteristic generosity.

Foley was strongly pro-European at a time when Labour, especially in opposition after 1970, was Euro-sceptic. He felt that the party tide was going against his convictions and, immediately after British entry to Europe in 1973, became deputy director general for development at the European Commission, helping to forge a new development policy. I worked closely with him there for several years, as a British element inserted by him into an office with a French head and a German deputy.

This was part of a diplomatic experiment, charged - unofficially - with selling British influence in a relationship with Africa that had been French-dominated. It was the time when the Yaounde convention gave way to the Lom? convention between Europe and the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, of which Foley was a main architect.

Despite the doubts of others, he saw clearly the need not just to end African colonial divisions but also to bring the Caribbean and Pacific nations into the relationship. They could otherwise have been the orphans of Britain's rush into Europe, and of the apparent ditching of certain Commonwealth ties, like the sugar agreement. This presaged the fullscale European development policy which was finally written into the Maastricht treaty. Foley's vision coincided with that of the French development commissioner under whom he had to work, the brilliant egomaniac Claude Cheysson.

Foley was also the leading Brussels advocate of those struggling for liberation in southern Africa, especially against apartheid. He made sure that people like Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, and Oliver Tambo of South Africa had a sympathetic hearing in Brussels, and started to benefit from EU assistance well before liberation, even though there was a pro-Pretoria rearguard action from parts of the external relations directorate. This was Maurice's lasting contribution to one aspect of the still embryonic common foreign policy; the dividends from it are still being enjoyed.

Essentially a politician, Foley was impatient with the bureaucratic intrigues of Brussels, but his gutsy honesty and commitment were appreciated by Africans and other third worlders he dealt with, even if his lack of Euro-gamesmanship sometimes let them down. Too often, he left the technical detail, which he saw as nit-picking, to the technicians - in Brussels, the devil was in the detail.

He also never had backing from the Foreign Office, even though development was then the second largest item in the European budget. He had hoped to become director general for development in the late 1970s, but received no support from the Labour prime minister James Callaghan or the FO. Also, the French still thought it important to exclude anyone British from the top job - especially one as political as Foley.

In the 1980s, he became increasingly frustrated, and sought early retirement in 1987, at which point he received a CMG. His warmth and humanity were much missed, although by then Africa was being marginalised as the 1970s era of innovation that led to the Lom? convention came to an end.

There was something of Tony Blair in Foley's glad-handing, muscular Christian approach to Africa. The cheerful welcome that visitors - from Labour MPs to southern African freedom fighters - received in his office was a welcome haven.

He leaves his wife Katherine, a daughter, and three sons.

? Anthony Maurice Foley, politician and European civil servant, born October 9 1925; died February 8 2002

Posted By: DrDublin, Feb 14, 00:41:49