Denis Healey 1917-2015: when the Labour right were serious political figures
Denis Healey died aged 98 in 2015 and attracted praise as a titan of the labour movement, from Jeremy Corbyn as then Labour leader of course but also David Cameron then PM.
Healey who had addressed the 1945 Labour conference as Major in uniform (having recently left the Communist Party) was a figure of the Labour right, but a serious one. Not for him splits to join the SDP or talk that Labour at this or that period was finished.
As a labour movement activist since the 1970s I disagreed with much of what Healey did, particular the IMF cuts period from 1976. He saw it as essential. My view now as then was that the longer term needed to be thought about. If the left did not present a coherent alternative to market economics, however compelling they might have seemed at the moment, things weren’t likely to go well. And mostly unfortunately, think Mrs Thatcher, they didn’t. Healey was not to blame for that but a logic of political positions was being established in the 1970s crisis.
Tony Benn’s Diaries contain a rich vein of anecdotes about. The point is that he was not a god, but a politician very much of his times and needs to be understood as such.
As for an epitaph and lessons for the future, perhaps the point is that as Hendrix after Dylan noted ‘there are many here among us that feel that life is but a joke, but you and I we’ve been through that and that is not our fate’.
Healey was a serious politician who deserves to be taken seriously, but not uncritically
In comparison to the Starmerite right of 2024 he not only had impressive eyebrows but also what he called ‘hinterland’. A figure of the right who strongly opposed the left but also recognisably a human being beyond politics
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