Denis Healey

"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 war has been the death by bombardment of countless thousands of innocent European men and women."

"Britain's economic problem is fundamentally far greater than France's since France is much less dependent on foreign trade and imported raw materials. Moreover Britain has economic relations with her Commonwealth whose importance outweighs the potential benefits of economic co-operation with Europe. For example, by 1952 over half Britain's foreign trade will be with the Commonwealth as against 22 per cent with Europe. Also Britain's imports from the Commonwealth are mainly indispensable raw materials, whereas her imports from Europe are less essential."

"By his conduct of the campaign against the Labour Government Aneurin Bevan has destroyed a good chance of succeeding the Party's leadership. Whereas Bevan's proletarian virility has always hypnotised many middle-class intellectuals, the trade unionists tend to see in him the familiar figure of the self-seeking agitator... Bevanism is essentially a flight from reality into dogma. But its opponents have had little to offer as a positive alternative. The Great Debate in British Socialism has so far consisted in one side talking nonsense and the other side keeping mum. The Labour Party may hope to carry the Welfare State and planning further than the Tories, but for a long time physical and psychological factors will fix rigid limits. Further 'soaking the rich' will no longer benefit the poor to any noticeable extent. Further nationalisation no longer attracts more than a tiny fringe of the Labour Party itself; it positively repels the electorate as a whole. Even among Labour economists there is a growing revolt against physical controls in favour of the price mechanism. A policy based on class war cannot have a wide appeal when the difference between classes is so small as Labour made it."

"Nye [Bevan] thinks that the best way to win friends and influence people is to kick them in the teeth... But there is in the country and in the Party a great deal of real anti-Americanism and in my view it is a disgrace to Socialism and a menace to peace. A lot of it is just jingoism with an inferiority complex, trying to make foreigners a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in this country. We are Socialists; we are supposed to believe...in the brotherhood of man, and we cannot say all men are brothers except Americans... I ask you to throw away the stale mythology of these political Peter Pans... We cannot solve the problems of foreign policy on a diet of rhetorical candy-floss."

"'The owl of Minerva only flies abroad when the shades of night are gathering.' Speaking for Conservatism, Hegel was right. And nothing proves it better than the post-war crop of Tory intellectuals, sprouting like mushrooms in the damp cellars of Abbey House. Not until the stimuli which originally conditioned Conservative reflexes have finally disappeared can the intellectual emerge to provide a rationale for Conservative behaviour. So Conservative theory must always base itself on some form of historical restorationism. The moderate seeks the world of Joseph Chamberlain—or if he is daring, of Disraeli. The really advanced radical looks still further back, to Prince Rupert, or the Middle Ages, particularly if he is a Catholic."

"Hugh Gaitskell was absolutely right when he said yesterday that what gets cheers at this conference does not necessarily get votes at elections. If it did we would have won Devonport [the seat which Michael Foot had just lost]. There are far too many people who...want to luxuriate complacency in moral righteousness in Opposition. But who is going to pay the price for their complacency? You can take the view that it is better to give up half a loaf if you cannot get the whole loaf, but the point is that it is not we who are giving up the half loaf. In Britain it is the unemployed and old age pensioners, and outside Britain there are millions of people in Asia and Africa who desperately need a Labour Government in this country to help them. If you take the view that it is all right to stay in Opposition so long as your Socialist heart is pure, you will be 'all right, Jack'. You will have your TV set, your motor car and your summer holidays on the Continent and still keep your Socialist soul intact. The people who pay the price for your sense of moral satisfaction are the Africans, millions of them, being slowly forced into racial slavery; the Indians and the Indonesians dying of starvation. We are not just a debating society. We are not just a Socialist Sunday School. We are a great movement that wants to help real people living on this earth at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country."

"I think the Services can be rightly very upset at the continuous series of defence reviews which the Government has been forced by economic circumstances—and maybe economic mistakes too—to carry out..."

"I warn my hon. Friends...that once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders."

"We did not want middle class Robespierres."

"Do we really want to nationalise Marks and Spencers to make it as efficient as the Co-Op?"

"We are all agreed on a massive extension of public ownership...We are all agreed on establishing comprehensive planning control over the 100 or so largest companies in Britain. We are all agreed on the need for a national enterprise board to organise and extend public ownership in the profitable manufacturing industries."

"We shall increase income tax on the better off so that we can help the hundreds of thousands of families now tangled helplessly in the poverty trap by raising the tax threshold and introducing reduced rates of tax for those at the bottom of the ladder. I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the rich. But before you cheer too loudly let me warn you that a lot of you will pay extra taxes too."

"Squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak"

"It has never been my nature, I regret to admit to the House, to turn the other cheek."

"It is far better that more people should be in work, even if that means accepting lower wages on average, than that those lucky enough to keep their jobs should scoop the pool while millions are living on the dole. That is what the social contract is all about."

"We are spending 6 per cent more than we are earning... You can also bankrupt a nation by excessive wage demands... That is why I said that it is better to have a lower standard of life for all workers than for some of them to be unemployed."

"The fact is that she [Margaret Thatcher] emerged in this debate as La Pasionaria of privilege."

"The borrowing requirement was 'terrifying'. He just had to cut back public expenditure. The Social Contract wasn't working. Inflation was getting out of control."

"I fully understand why I have been urged by so many friends both inside and outside the House to treat unemployment as the central problem and to stimulate a further growth in home consumption, public or private, so as to start getting the rate of unemployment down as fast as possible. I do not believe it would be wise to follow this advice today. As I have said, I did last July and November adopt reflationary measures whose full effect would only be felt this year. I cannot afford to increase demand further today when 5p in every £ we spend at home has been provided by our creditors abroad and inflation is running at its current rate. I do not believe anyone in Britain would thank me for producing an even larger deficit on our balance of payments and injecting a further massive dose of inflation through price and wage increases. Moreover a Rake's Progress of this nature could not last for long. The patience of our creditors would soon be exhausted. We would then face the appalling prospect of going down in a matter of weeks to the levels of public services and personal living standards which we could finance entirely from what we earned. I do not believe that our political or social system could stand that strain."

"The Budget I have presented today is a hard one for all of us in Britain. It is dictated by the harsh reality of the world we live in. A severe Budget is a necessary element in any strategy for improving the overall performance of our economy, which has been lagging increasingly behind most industrial economies for more than a single generation. Added to the need for measures to produce the essential structural changes in the balance of our economy are the burdens we carry with other countries because the explosion of world prices has cut our real income by 4 per cent. But in this situation the key to our immediate success is the rate of inflation inside Britain, and it is our failure here which is responsible for the special severity of this Budget. So long as pay and prices increase at their present rates, no Chancellor of the Exchequer who puts his country first would act otherwise than I have done this afternoon."

"No country would suffer more than Britain from an international trade war, since we depend more on world trade than any of our competitors. That is why we cannot accept the proposal made in some quarters that we should seek to solve our problems through imposing import controls for a long period over a whole range of manufactured consumer goods."

"He must be out of his tiny Chinese mind."

"By the end of next year, we really shall be on our way to that so-called economic miracle we need."

"If we can keep our heads—and our nerve—the long-awaited economic miracle is in our grasp. Britain can achieve in the Seventies what Germany and France achieved in the Fifties and Sixties."

"The alternative to getting help from the IMF would be economic policies so savage I think they would produce riots in the streets, an immediate fall in living standards and unemployment of three million."

"I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)"

"No Government can produce an economic miracle. An economic miracle depends on people on the shop floor, in the board room, in the sales office, working a bit harder and more efficiently than they have worked in the past."

"Keynesianism has failed."

"The central problem of our economy for more than a generation has been that, although our productivity has grown more slowly than that of our competitors, we have seen annual wage increases of the same order as theirs. So our inflation has risen faster than in other countries and we have been able to maintain price competitiveness and full employment only by a series of devaluations which have further added to inflation and increased the pressure for excessive wage increases. In the era of North Sea oil it will be more difficult to devalue our currency to maintain price competitiveness. So unless we can keep wage increases close to the level of productivity increase we shall face rising unemployment and a further erosion of our industrial base."

"I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round - a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep."

"Austria came to terms with its political and economic disadvantages after the war, jettisoned those parts of its Marxist ideological inheritance which were obviously no longer relevant, and turned a country which in the inter-war years had been suffering from an ex-imperial hangover into a model welfare state, without sacrificing any of its cultural attractions in the process. [I am offering no New Jerusalem], simply a country with stable prices, jobs for those who want them and help for those who need it."

"Our party can't be united unless it remains what it always has been till now: a broad coalition of men and women from all sections of our society, supporting many different approaches to democratic socialism, who tolerate their disagreements with one another, and defend the right of minorities to fight for changes in the policies they disagree with."

"I don't believe the party gains when a member of the last two Labour governments stumps round the country blackguarding the record of the governments as a betrayal of the British working class, and describing the Prime Ministers through whom he accepted office as medieval monarchs who turned Labour MPs into their puppets. What nonsense! Tell that to Eric Heffer or Jeff Rooker or any of the many Labour MPs who've made my life as Chancellor so difficult from time to time, and I never objected to that. No! Those who betray the working class of Britain are those who forced us for two whole years to fight one another when we should have been fighting the Tories and through a sort of ideological narcissism are helping to keep in power the most brutal government in living memory, a government which has commit itself to destroy our trade union movement. We didn't lose the last election because we failed to follow the advice of these elitists. It was Maggie Thatcher who won the last election, not Mick McGahey. And we're losing votes today not to the Socialist Workers Party or the IMG but to David Steel and Roy Jenkins."

"NATO's nuclear strategy is an essential part of that balance [between East and West]. To threaten to upset it by refusing to let America base any of her nuclear weapons in Britain would make war more likely, not less likely."

"I would fight to change the policy before the General Election. If I failed then I wouldn't accept office in a Labour Government."

"Faced with the difficulties of unilateral reflation, some socialists are tempted to seek salvation through trade restrictions or competitive devaluation. But such beggar-my-neighbour policies, if pursued on the scale required...are more likely to lead to a trade and currency war than to insulate their sponsors from the recession in the outside world."

"We will unilaterally get rid of Trident and cruise, and we will put Polaris into the arms talks with the Soviet Union and hope to phase it out in multilateral negotiations. If the Russians...fail to cut their nuclear forces accordingly it would be a new situation that we could consider at that time."

"[Margaret Thatcher] wraps herself in the Union Jack and exploits the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors and airmen in the Falkland Islands for purely party advantage – and hopes to get away with it. It wasn't a very credible approach from the word 'go' because this Prime Minister, who glories in slaughter, who has taken advantage of the superb professionalism of our armed forces, is at this very moment lending the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires millions of pounds to buy weapons – including weapons made in Britain – to kill British servicemen. That is an act of stupefying hypocrisy."

"What almost halved the support for the Labour Party was the feeling that it has lost its traditional common sense and its humanity to a new breed of sectarian extremism."

"[W]ho is the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust? The answer to that is clear. The handling of this decision by—I quote her own Back Benchers—the great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed, the Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Prime Minister herself, has drawn sympathetic trade unionists, such as Len Murray, into open revolt. Her pig-headed bigotry has prevented her closest colleagues and Sir Robert Armstrong from offering and accepting a compromise. The right hon. Lady, for whom I have a great personal affection, has formidable qualities, a powerful intelligence and immense courage, but those qualities can turn into horrendous vices, unless they are moderated by colleagues who have more experience, understanding and sensitivity. As she has got rid of all those colleagues, no one is left in the Cabinet with both the courage and the ability to argue with her. I put it to all Conservative Members, but mainly to the Government Front Bench, that to allow the right hon. Lady to commit Britain to another four years of capricious autocracy would be to do fearful damage not just to the Conservative party but to the state."

"So long as the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons there have to be nuclear weapons somewhere in NATO to deter them from using them."

"The reason we were defeated in so far as defence played a role is that people believe we were in favour of unilaterally disarming ourselves. It wasn't the confusion. It was the unilateralism that was the damaging thing."

"We are going through a period of uncertainty, but we are in a good position to strengthen ourselves and win back a majority. We have already got rid of much deadwood and Kinnock is winning back younger voters. He is politically intelligent, has character and courage; but he has never been a minister, lacks experience, and people know it. In troubled times, the electorate looks for a strong leader and Mrs Thatcher is seen as one."

"The US, whether we like it or not, has nuclear weapons. The US is a member of NATO. Possession by the US of nuclear weapons is obviously a deterrent."

"No. Absolutely not. I think that the Russians are praying for a Labour victory...praying is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. I think that they would much prefer a Labour government and that the idea that they would prefer a Tory government, I think is utter bunkum, and they [the Soviets] authorized me to say so."

"I am a socialist who believes that the Labour Party offers the best hope for Britain's future."

"I wouldn't object strongly to leaving the EU. The advantages of being members of the union are not obvious. The disadvantages are very obvious. I can see the case for leaving – the case for leaving is stronger than for staying in."

"The trouble about Europe is what I call the Olive Line, the line below which people grow olives. North of the Olive Line people pay their taxes and spend public money very cautiously. South of it they fail to pay their taxes at all, but spend a lot of public money."

"[Referring to the "Olive line"] That division makes federation impossible – inconceivable, in my opinion."

"Denis Healey was a great champion for social justice, in and out of government, a stalwart of the Labour Party, a true patriot who fought for and cared deeply about his country and an extraordinary and vibrant character. ... He steered the Labour government and the country through some of the most difficult economic times; and in winning the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, he probably saved the Labour Party as an instrument of government and social change. All of us in the Labour Party owe him a huge debt. Britain has lost a dedicated and faithful public servant."