Roy Hattersley and the Death of Labour

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.

As an opposition MP Hattersley memorably contributed to in-depth BBC radio and TV broadcasts in the early 1980s, offering high-level insights on political philosophy and ideology in an era that eschewed dumbed-down audience appeasement. In the 1987 General Election Hattersley told a live TV audience of his desire for 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. 

A Labour leader with intellect and passion who advocated defence, patriotism and peace

Michael Foot's reply to Margaret Thatcher in the emergency House of Commons' Falkland Islands debate in April 1982 was the speech of a statesman, delivered with passion, wit and intellect. Its assault on the Thatcher Government’s signal failure to deliver on the first responsibility of any government, that of protecting its people, ought to have made a mockery of the Conservatives’ vaunted defence credentials. It was delivered by a Labour leader who believed in conventional military deterrence and who rhetorically asked why Margaret Thatcher seemingly didn’t, in practise. The previous Labour Government, of which Foot was a very senior member, had mobilised a flotilla in advance of an Argentinian threat, thereby successfully preventing the possibility of invasion. Given the current Conservative Government‘s announcement of a large defence expenditure expansion amidst economic retrenchment, when the Con-Dem Government had previously recklessly slashed defence spending and left the UK without an aircraft carrier for many years, it would be wise to once again question the credentials of a Conservative Government on defence. Foot of course could reach back to his own assaults on another Conservative Government being soft on defence and on fascism (I use the word advisedly) in the latter 1930s. Sad that this great man should have been so pilloried and so parodied to the detriment of appreciating the power of his reason and his rhetoric. Sad that after the moronic disdain for defence shown by the last Labour leader we don’t have one now who's able to rip apart the Tories’ pretensions as the ‘patriotic party’. To hear Foot's speech click on this link