Roy Hattersley is dead. Not a British political great,
Hattersley was though a postwar big beast. In this age of political 'pygmies', to
paraphrase another under-appreciated Labour heavy-hitter Dick Crossman, Roy
Hattersley stands out as an important member of the Party's once great
headmasterly tradition. Like his supposed political opponent Michael Foot, but from
a more modest class hue, Hattersley was both a political intellectual and party
infighter, equal parts literary and tactically calculating; a Labour romantic
steeped in both tradition and ideas.
As only a former deputy party leader in opposition, and only
a middling cabinet member, Hattersley will not be as much remembered as his
eventual close colleague, and leader, Neil Kinnock, who never held a
ministerial job. However Hattersley was a major figure in the Labour Party's
postwar journey from corporatist Labourism to a rooted social democracy that
stood several notches to the left of Corbynite infantilism let alone the human
face of neoliberalism embodied by Blair and Starmer. Hattersley was old school
because, like enemy Tony Benn and ally Peter Shore, he could articulate both
original thought and practical policies.
Hattersley unsuccessfully fought Labour's 1981 Deputy Leadership election, widely contested on the BBC as high level debate not dumbed down audience appeasement, providing philosophical insight as well as political pragmatism. In the 1987 General Election, Hattersley offered Britain an ideological fight between his liberal socialism and free market inequality. He hadn't needed to join the Social Democratic Party of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen because he deeply embodied that part of Labour's historic tradition. He also wasn't so politically misguided.
At a time when the best hope for the survival of a party
with 108 years of mass political experience behind it is another likeable and
smart northerner but one bereft of ideas, Roy Hattersley's death signposts a
political transition. His was a democratic class politics rooted in both
philosophy and interests. It has been succeeded by a coercive class politics pitting
Labour's former working class white bedrock against its former bourgeois liberal
allies. A very sad day indeed.
