I liked Michael Foot, but his worldview had already had its day by the time he became leader. Healey might have been a more moderate and stronger leader potentially, but the political philosophy that both men espoused was already in the dustbin of history, where it belonged.
Long before 1983 Healey had crawled to the EMF, cap in hand, to beg for money to prop up the British state because that awful, final British socialist government in which he served as Chancellor had run out of other people's money to spend. Their terms for bailing us out were to impose public spending cuts that made the austerity budgets of the 2010s look positively extravagant - and all that culminated of course with the infamous Winter of Discontent at the end of the previous decade.
No, the British People had had enough of that model of ruining British industries by privatising them, removing competition by making them monopolies then crippling them with the militant trade unionism that had Labour in its pocket. Margaret Thatcher saved us from all that starting in 1979 and if she hadn't, we'd have been a third-world country by the '90s. We near enough were by 1979.
It wasn't the Falklands War that won the 1983 General Election for the Conservatives. It was Michael Foot's "longest suicide note in history"; a manifesto that called for wholesale renationalisation, abandonment of our nuclear deterrent, and for Britain to leave the EEC at a time when it was a relatively benign trading partnership. The country had already woken up.
To our credit we never looked back, and when Labour next had a spell in office it was a considerably less harmful government that even had a modest privatisation of its own and wisely chose to build on the precious Thatcher legacy.
By the way I'm not sure you'll find anyone of note in the Parliamentary Labour Party complaining about those defence cuts before they were implemented. Keir Starmer didn't invent hindsight.
Long before 1983 Healey had crawled to the EMF, cap in hand, to beg for money to prop up the British state because that awful, final British socialist government in which he served as Chancellor had run out of other people's money to spend. Their terms for bailing us out were to impose public spending cuts that made the austerity budgets of the 2010s look positively extravagant - and all that culminated of course with the infamous Winter of Discontent at the end of the previous decade.
No, the British People had had enough of that model of ruining British industries by privatising them, removing competition by making them monopolies then crippling them with the militant trade unionism that had Labour in its pocket. Margaret Thatcher saved us from all that starting in 1979 and if she hadn't, we'd have been a third-world country by the '90s. We near enough were by 1979.
It wasn't the Falklands War that won the 1983 General Election for the Conservatives. It was Michael Foot's "longest suicide note in history"; a manifesto that called for wholesale renationalisation, abandonment of our nuclear deterrent, and for Britain to leave the EEC at a time when it was a relatively benign trading partnership. The country had already woken up.
To our credit we never looked back, and when Labour next had a spell in office it was a considerably less harmful government that even had a modest privatisation of its own and wisely chose to build on the precious Thatcher legacy.
By the way I'm not sure you'll find anyone of note in the Parliamentary Labour Party complaining about those defence cuts before they were implemented. Keir Starmer didn't invent hindsight.
