Healey: The antithesis of the machine politician

My Journal column may have gone, but life and politics goes on, and since this blog is now the sole remaining outlet for my political writing, it is here that any periodic musings on the state of the nation will be appearing.

I could not, of course, let the death of Denis Healey pass without comment.  On my Facebook page I described him yesterday both as my political hero and without doubt the greatest Prime Minister Britain never had.   As those are bold statements I feel the need this morning to amplify them a bit.

There have been many politicians I have admired down the years - Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, David Owen, Charles Kennedy and Robin Cook to name but five.  What was it that made Denis stand out in particular?

I think it was probably summed up in the word he himself used - his "hinterland."  A WW2 hero and genuine polymath, Healey was the very antithesis of today's machine politicians who progress effortlessly from uni to MPs' research assistant to parliamentary candidate without experiencing anything resembling the real world.

Opinions will invariably differ about whether Denis was a great politician.  His tendency to make unnecessary enemies at the height of his career in the 70s and early 80s probably cost him the leadership of the Labour Party, but it was that very refusal to 'play the political game' that made him, in my eyes, such an attractive figure.

An alternative history of Britain in the 1980s would have had him as Prime Minister in place of Margaret Thatcher, using the benefits of North Sea Oil to build a Swedish-style social democracy instead of the American-style market economy we became.  I happen to think Britain would be a kinder and fairer society now had that been the case.

Could it have happened?   Probably not. Denis's best chance of becoming PM probably came in 1976 when Harold Wilson retired, but he came a poor third behind Jim Callaghan.   By the time Callaghan stepped down in 1980, the left was in disarray and the Thatcherite hegemony was in full swing.

Denis as leader in place of Michael Foot might have limited the scale of Thatcher's victory in the post-Falklands election in 1983, but I don't, in all honesty, think he would have stopped it.

Where a Healey leadership would have made a bigger difference is in terms of the internal politics of the left.  Had he succeeded Callaghan in 1980, the marginalisation of the hard left would have begun five years earlier than it actually did, and the impact of the SDP breakaway would have been greatly reduced.

In this respect, it is tragic that Denis should have lived to see the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader - an outcome he sought to prevent in what proved to be the last political intervention of his career.

Ever since I first launched this blog more than ten years ago, the footer has contained a quote from Denis's autobiography 'The Time of My Life' - a comment about his old friend and rival Roy Jenkins which says just as much about himself.

"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Why do I like this quote so much? Well, partly because it references Trollope, but mainly because it sums up in a single sentence the tension which makes politics such an endlessly fascinating business.

It is, more often than not, Jenkins' definition which prevails. But Healey's definition of politics is the way it probably ought to be. 

Thatcher: There WAS an alternative

The first thing I need to say about Margaret Thatcher is that when it comes to the former Prime Minister, I can scarcely be regarded as a disinterested or objective observer.

I spent most of my early adulthood wishing she was no longer in Number Ten, and much of my later journalistic career was spent in areas such as South Wales and the North-East where the impact of her policies had been most adversely felt.

As Journal political editor from 1997-2004, much of my work revolved around the question of how the region should tackle the North-South divide which, if not created by her, was certainly sharply exacerbated during her long premiership.

So in the unlikely event that anyone has come here expecting to read another syrupy paean of praise to the Iron Lady following her death this week, it’s probably best to look away now.

Many millions of words have already been written and spoken about the woman who led Britain for 11 tumultuous years, but ultimately the debate seems to come down to the question of whether she saved the nation, or destroyed it.

Probably the answer is a bit of both.  Looked at in the round, the Thatcher legacy suggests a strange ambivalent power for good and bad which seems to run through most of the policies with which she is most closely associated.

Take the iconic right to buy scheme, for instance.  Yes, it enabled council tenants to buy their own homes, and the dramatic increase in social mobility it fostered helped break down the class barriers which held Britain back in the post-war years.

But the downside was that housing policy ceased to be a debate about who could build the most homes, and became instead a question of who could do most to artificially inflate the value of the increasingly limited number of homes available.

Then there were the employment laws.  It is beyond question that prior to 1979 the power of the union barons had got out of hand and that Mrs Thatcher’s changes helped restore a measure of democracy to a nation in danger of becoming ungovernable.

Yet in smashing the unions, she also ushered in an era of job insecurity which has had a baleful effect on the national psyche.

I could go on.   Deregulation of the City of London made it a world financial centre that spawned untold riches for Britain’s financial services industry, but led directly to the banking crisis that caused the 2008 crash and the subsequent recession.

Even the Falklands War, by rolling back the post-Suez defeatism in which British foreign policy had been enmeshed since 1956, paved the way for Tony Blair’s disastrous intervention in Iraq twenty years later.

When assessing the Thatcher legacy, therefore, the key question becomes could we actually have had the good without the bad?  Was there, despite what the Iron Lady herself said, an alternative?

I would like to think so.   While the challenges of globalisation would eventually have forced British industry to become more competitive, the impact of this would have been slower and less brutal than the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing base in the early 1980s.

It has to be remembered that, far from being an historical inevitability, Mrs Thatcher was in fact a very lucky Prime Minister. 

Labour in 1980 put itself out of serious contention for power by choosing the wrong leader and then splitting, while a couple of Exocet missiles in the wrong place in 1982 might have sunk not just the Falklands task force, but her premiership with it.

For me, the most interesting counterfactual question about Mrs Thatcher is what would the country have been like had she never become Prime Minister or, alternatively, been ousted in 1982-83.

Had a Tory wet like Jim Prior or a Labour moderate like Denis Healey run Britain in the 1980s, and invested the proceeds of North Sea Oil in social reconstruction rather than tax cuts, would we have ended up with Swedish-style social democracy rather than US-style neo-liberalism?

Since those days, we seem to have become a politically more united country, but a much more economically and socially divided one.

And if forced to make a judgement, I think I like the Britain she created rather less than the one which she destroyed.