The Guardian view on Denis Healey: the last of a great generation
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Version 0 of 1. The death of Denis Healey on Saturday means much more than the passing of a grand old man of British politics. He was the last of the political generation that shaped post-war Britain, men and women who had not only lived through, and often fought in, the second world war, but who had also seen at first hand the terrible years of sustained depression of the 1920s and the 1930s. In Labour, they were a generation who had seen the party torn apart in 1931 only to regroup, rebuild and emerge able to claim, as Harold Wilson so hubristically did in 1974, that Labour had become the natural party of government. They were the generation who were in politics to honour the vow: never again. Today, when so much of what they built is being undermined, their sense of shared purpose is much more apparent than it seemed at the time. Labour spent most of the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1980s split into warring camps. The two wings of the party were fundamentally divided on nuclear weapons, and later on Britain’s place in Europe. But on the broad direction of the economy and on the role of the state, the party’s view was more or less coherent. It was also in harmony with an electorate whose attitudes had been formed by the same experiences of peace and war. The generation of politicians who (unlike Major Healey) won their seats in the 1945 Labour landslide emerged with a mandate to reshape Britain, and they did it with such authority that, for most of the next 30 years, the Conservative party had no choice but to accede to the transformation. Labour had national support for sweeping change, but that did not mean that delivering it would be straightforward, least of all in a country that was exhausted after six years of war and 20 years of economic recession. It is easy now to overlook the sheer political courage and energy it took to create a National Health Service against bitter and vociferous opposition, and to nationalise the hundreds of near-bankrupt private coal mines, the country’s docks and its railways while introducing at the same time a scheme of welfare designed to slay Beveridge’s five giants. Yet creating the postwar settlement was in many ways easier than sustaining it would prove. As defence secretary throughout the Labour government of the 1960s and as chancellor during the 1970s, Healey was at the centre of the battle to keep it viable, not least in order to nurture the spirit that had helped to create it and was essential to support it. That meant reconfiguring foreign policy for a post-imperial Britain, pulling back from east of Suez, foregoing major spending commitments like a new fighter aircraft, and the bitter, often intensely personal rows over the morality and affordability of the nuclear deterrent. At the Treasury, Healey became the hated front man, making an argument that few in the party really understood, that the state itself needed to be reconfigured for altered circumstances. In narrowly political terms, Healey’s career might be judged a failure. The argument about the size of the state was lost for a generation. It remains the most divisive question in domestic politics. A less brilliant, more emollient character might have carried more weight with his successors. But he was the last of the lights that shone so brilliantly for a generation, and we mourn their passing. |