Denis
Healey, the son of an engineer, was was born in Keighley, Yorkshire
in 1917. When Healey was eight years old he won a scholarship to Bradford
Grammar School. Influenced by the poetry of Wilfred
Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon from
the First World War, Healey became a pacifist
and in 1935 resigned from the school's Officer's training Corps.
In
1936 Healey entered Balliol College, Oxford.
While at university he became active in politics. He rejected his
earlier pacifism and joined the Communist
Party. Healey later wrote: "For the young in those days,
politics was a world of simple choices. The enemy was Hitler with
his concentration camps. The objective was to prevent a war by standing
up to Hitler. Only the Communist Party seemed unambiguously against
Hitler. The Chamberlain Government was for appeasement. Labour seemed
torn between pacifism and a half-hearted support for collective security,
and the Liberals did not count.
On
the outbreak of the Second World War joined
the British
Army and
he served with the Royal Engineers in North
Africa, Sicily and Italy.
This included being Military Landing Officer to the British assault
brigade for Anzio. By the end of the war
Healey
had reached the rank of major.
Healey
left the Communist
Party during
the war and soon afterwards joined the Labour
Party.
In the 1945 General Election he stood for
Pudsey and Otley and was defeated by 1,651 votes. In November, 1945,
Healey became secretary of the International Department of the Labour
Party.
In
1952 Healey was elected to the House of Commons.
On
the right of the party, Healey became an outspoken critic of Aneurin
Bevan and
his followers. In 1959 Hugh Gaitskell
appointed Healey to the shadow cabinet.
When the
Labour
Party was
elected in the 1964 General Election, Harold
Wilson, the new prime minister, appointed Healey as his Secretary
of State for Defence. Over
the next six years he attempted to preserve the country's defence
commitments but he eventually had to accept defeat and began withdrawing
Britain's armed forces from Aden and the Persian Gulf. Healey held
the post until the defeat of the Labour government in the 1970
General Election.
Edward
Heath
and his Conservative government came into conflict with the trade
unions over his attempts to impose a prices and incomes policy. His
attempts to legislate against unofficial strikes led to industrial
disputes. In 1973 a miners' work-to-rule led to regular power cuts
and the imposition of a three day week. Heath called a general election
in 1974 on the issue of "who rules". He failed to get a
majority and Harold Wilson and the Labour
Party were returned to power.
Harold
Wilson appointed Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The economy
was in a bad way and in 1976 Healey was forced to obtain a $3.9 billion
loan from the International Monetary Fund. When Wilson resigned in
1976, Healey stood for the leadership but was defeated by James
Callaghan.
The following
year Healey controversially began imposing tight monetary controls.
This included deep cuts in public spending on education and health.
Critics claimed that this laid the foundations of what became known
as monetarism. In 1978 these public spending cuts led to a wave of
strikes (winter of discontent) and the Labour
Party was easily defeated in the 1979 General
Election.
In 1980
Healey once again contested the leadership of the Labour
Party. He was unexpectedly defeated by Michael
Foot and had to be satisfied with the post of deputy leader.
Healey
resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1987. His autobiography, The
Time of My Life, was published in 1989.
(1)
Denis
Healey, The Time of My
Life (1989)
For the young in those days, politics was a world of simple choices.
The enemy was Hitler with his concentration camps. The objective was
to prevent a war by standing up to Hitler. Only the Communist Party
seemed unambiguously against Hitler. The Chamberlain Government was
for appeasement. Labour seemed torn between pacifism and a halfhearted
support for collective security, and the Liberals did not count. Everything
began to change, of course, with the Stalin-Hitler Pact and the Soviet
attack on Finland; but it was at first too easy to rationalise these
reversals of Russian policy simply as a reaction to the failure of
Britain and France to build a common front against Hitler.
(2)
On the outbreak of the Second World War Denis
Healey joined the British
Army. He wrote about it in his autobiography,
The Time of My Life (1989)
Unfashionable though it is to admit it, I enjoyed my five years
in the wartime army.
It was a life very different from anything I had known, or expected.
Long periods of boredom were broken by short bursts of excitement.
For the first time I had to learn to do nothing but wait - for me
the most difficult lesson of all. To my great relief, I found I did
not get frightened in action - not that I enjoyed being shelled or
dive-bombed any more than the next man; but fear never paralysed me
or even pushed me off my stroke. On the other hand I was never called
on to show the sort of active courage which wins men the VC. A dumb,
animal endurance is the sort of courage most men need in war. I was
constantly amazed by the ability of the average soldier, and civilian,
to exhibit this under stress.
(3)
Denis
Healey, letter to Ivor Thomas,
Labour Party MP (February, 1945)
A man pushed blindfold into a courtroom
with cotton wool in his ears, obliged
to plead for his life without knowing where the jury was sitting or
even whether it was in the room at all, would nicely represent my
position at this moment... I am only one of the hundreds of young
men, now in the forces, who long for the opportunity to realise their
political ideals by actively fighting an election for the Labour Party.
These men in their turn represent millions of soldiers, sailors and
airmen who want socialism and who have been fighting magnificently
to save a world in which socialism is possible. Many of them have
come to realise that socialism is a matter of life and death for them.
But too many others feel that politics is just another civilian racket
in which they are always the suckers . .. We have now almost won the
war, at the highest price ever paid for victory. If you could see
the shattered misery that
once was Italy, the bleeding countryside and the wrecked villages,
if you could see Cassino, with a bomb-created river washing green
slime through a shapeless rubble that a year ago was homes, you would
realise more than ever that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is
not enough, by itself to justify the destruction, not just of twenty
years of fascism, but too often of twenty centuries of Europe. Only
a more glorious future can make up for this annihilation of the past.
(4)
Denis
Healey, speech at the Labour Party Conference
(21st May, 1945)
The upper classes in every country
are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent. The struggle for socialism
in Europe ... has been hard, cruel, merciless and bloody. The penalty
for participation in the liberation movement has been death for oneself,
if caught, and, if not caught oneself, the burning of one's home and
the death by torture of one's family ... Remember that one of the
prices paid for our survival during the last five years has been the
death by bombardment of
countless thousands of innocent European men and women.
(5)
Harold
Wilson,
Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
I made Denis Healey Minister
of Defence. He is a strange person. When he was at Oxford he was a
communist. Then friends took him in hand, sent him to the Rand Corporation
of America, where he was brainwashed and came back very right wing.
But his method of thinking was still what it had been: in other words,
the absolute certainty that he was right and everybody else was wrong,
and not merely wrong through not knowing the proper answers, but wrong
through malice. I had very little trouble with him on his own subject,
but he has a very good quick brain and can be very rough. He probably
intervened in Cabinet with absolute certainty about other departments
more than any minister
I have ever known, but he was a strong colleague and much respected.
(6)
Denis
Healey, speech at the Labour
Party Conference (1973)
The main reason for this enormous
foreign deficit is that he gave away
four thousand million pounds in the last three years in tax reliefs,
mainly to the rich, without cutting expenditure to scale and without
making any attempt to be sure that British industry had the capacity
to meet the consequent increase in demand, so we have had a steady
increase in imports of manufactured goods, a yawning trade gap, and
continual runs on sterling.
But before you cheer too
loudly, let me warn you that a lot of you will pay extra taxes, too.
That will go for every Member of Parliament in this hall, including
me ... There are going to be howls of anguish from the eighty thousand
people who are rich enough to pay over seventy-five per cent on the
last slice of their income. But how much do we hear from them today
of the eighty-five thousand families at the bottom of the earnings
scale who have to pay over seventy-five per cent on the last slice
of their income - and thirty thousand of them actually lose twenty-five
new pence or more, when their wages go up a pound?
(7)
Edward
Heath, The Course
of My Life (1988)
Between March and October
1974 the Labour government acted as we had expected. Denis Healey,
the new Chancellor, reversed our income tax cuts in the first of two
1974 budgets. The basic rate was increased from 30 to 33 per cent,
and Value Added Tax was extended to sweets, soft drinks and ice cream.
Corporation tax and stamp duty were significantly increased. Overall,
the tax burden was increased by over .£2,000 million per year
in this budget, about £12,000 million in today's values. Significant
price increases were announced for the products of nationalised industries,
including coal and steel. Postal charges also rose considerably.
(8)
Denis
Healey, wrote about his period
as Chancellor of the Exchequer in his autobiography The Time of
My Life (1989)
So I decided to reduce the PSBR by raising taxes and cutting
public spending, so that firms would be compelled to export what they
could not sell at home. It was a Herculean task. The enormous interest
payments Britain had incurred by borrowing to finance its twin deficits
since the Barber boom started in 1971, meant that we had to run very
fast even to stand still. Yet we managed to complete the most important
part of our task in just three years. In fact the latest statistics
show that we had eliminated our balance of payments deficit in 1977.
By the middle of 1978 our GDP was growing over three per cent a year,
as against a fall of one per cent in 1975/6. Unemployment, which rose
very fast in my first three years, had been falling for nine months;
and inflation was below eight per cent. It was one of the few periods
in postwar British history in which unemployment and inflation were
both falling at the same time.
Politically, by far the
most difficult part of my ordeal was the continual reduction of public
spending; almost all of the spending cuts ran against the Labour Party's
principles, and many also ran against our campaign promises. Here
again, my task was complicated by the Treasury's inability either
to know exactly what was happening, or to control it. In November
1975 Wynne Godley, who had himself served in the Treasury as an economist,
showed that public spending in 1974/5 was some £5 billion higher
in real terms than had been planned by Barber in 1971. This was one
of the reasons why I decided to fix cash limits on spending as well
as pay, since departments tended to use inflation as a cover for increasing
their spending in real terms.
Cash limits worked all too well in holding spending down. Departments
were so frightened of exceeding their limits that they tended to underspend,
sometimes dramatically so. In 1976/7 public spending was £2.2
billion less than planned.
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