#denis healey

[ministerforpeas]

Everyone Goes to the Toilet!

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression "Fuck off".

- Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World    

[1five1two]

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.

Denis Healey

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, England

1974-1979

[pourunhomme]

Denis Healey

[textsfromwestminsterredux]

[tobaccopipes]

[danny4xb]

If you don't stop arguing with me, I will crawl under the table and chew your balls off.

Denis Healey,  Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Defence, explaining the finer details of civilian control of the military to a senior British Army officer in Northern Ireland, 1969

(this quote is from memory, because OF COURSE I have this quote memorised.)

[thecoppercow]

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 complacently in moral righteousness in Opposition. But who is going to pay the price for their complacency? You can take the view that it it 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 aged 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 their power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country.

Denis Healey, the great ‘Half a Loaf’ speech, 1959

Humans (and I say this as a fully paid up member of the soft left that still understands the concept of “hold your nose and vote” - or at least, learnt the lesson well on May 8th 2015) never, ever learn, history is basically a circle. If you replaced Devenport with Copeland, and I guess the African bit with just ‘foreign aid’...you’d think you were in a time warp. Applies not just to Labour, but all over the place, I should think.