John Healey hopes to achieve what Anthony Crosland couldn’t

‘I ’m not a great student of Labour history,” said John Healey, at the end of the morning that consigned a few environmentally conscious years of it to the recycling bin. “I just do it.” The chancellor is much less demonstrative than Andy Burnham, perhaps even a little inscrutable, but here is the quickest route to understanding him. If anything, Healey’s estimation of himself is too modest. He does not merely do Labour history: he is Labour history. Were there a Sealed Knot for the British centre left, balding men in late middle age would spend their bank holidays dressing up as Healey. The charity sector under Thatcher, the trade unions, a down-on-its-luck constituency in the South Yorkshire coalfield, Gordon Brown’s Treasury, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Sir Keir Starmer’s cash-strapped government: this one minister and his CV contain all the multitudes of Labour’s ever-changing accommodations with power and ideology. They are sometimes indignant, occasionally assured, but almost always awkward and uneasy. Most commented 1 Where’s Marie Curie? GCSE science ‘fails to credit women’ Science 232 comments 2 US withdraws diplomats from Saudi Arabia amid deadly Houthi attacks US news 202 comments 3 Alan Thornett obituary: union leader nicknamed ‘the Mole’ Obituaries 97 comments 4 MI5 spied on NHS founder Nye Bevan for decades History 87 comments 5 Times letters: Failure to protect the elderly in care homes Letters to the Editor 64 comments It’s all there in Healey , and the history was all there in his speech to the Labour conference last month. He spoke, as survivors of that all-powerful Treasury habitually do, of working for Gordon, and warned that the unfathomable riches that government had known were now all gone. His leitmotif was the miner’s lamp from Cortonwood Colliery that sits on his mantelpiece at home, at once a memento mori for the old economy and the inspiration for a new era of industrialisation. Top stories 1 Tripsnacking? Finally a travel trend I can get on board with Advice And then he mentioned Anthony Crosland, the philosopher-king of Labour revisionism, in terms that suggest he has read the history more closely than he lets on. “He died too young,” Healey said of Crosland when we spoke on Wednesday. “He’s not left his mark on the collective memory like he really deserves.” He did, however, leave his mark on Healey’s thinking. It was 70 years ago that Crosland published The Future of Socialism , which even now remains the great watershed in Labour thinking. “We stand in Britain,” he wrote, “on the threshold of mass abundance.” Labour was not even halfway through what turned out to be 13 years in opposition, the economy grew at a clip, and soon Harold Macmillan would tell an ever-more-affluent consumer society that they had never had it so good. These were disorienting times for the impatient young intellectuals of a Labour Party that had relearnt the habit of losing. Crosland, the cleverest of the lot, came to the heretical conclusion that it was completely wrong about itself. Advertisement The point of the Labour Party, as Clause IV of its constitution then said, was to “secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry… upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. Crosland, like his Oxford lover Roy Jenkins, had chafed against manifestos that proposed the nationalisation of sugar refineries and much else, and thought the left’s obsession with public ownership to be self-defeating and hopelessly outdated. After all, the solidity of the postwar consensus gave him reason to ask whether capitalism even still existed. So, as he later told Roy Hattersley the weekend before he died in 1977: “Socialism is about the pursuit of equality and protection of freedom.” Top stories 1 High street banks are on borrowed time Saving & Investing 2 Belgium’s most stylish autumn weekend break — and it’s not Bruges Belgium In other words, Labour did not have to be too prescriptive about how the economy grew, and who managed the things that made it grow, as long as the proceeds were shared equitably. Or, as Healey put it to me : the Crosland of the Fifties believed all government needed to do was “sit there as growth happened and redistribute it”. It was an optimistic school of thought best encapsulated in the sunny passage still quoted by today’s progressives: “We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions but more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs […] and so on ad infinitum.” The shock of the new was so exhilarating that most people who pray Crosland in aid forget what happened next. Healey has not. Compare those lines from The Future of Socialism to these, from 1974’s Socialism Now . By then, bigger promises of Harold Wilson’s governments had gone unfulfilled, as had most of Crosland’s ambitions. “Too complacent,” he said of himself. He was not living in the carefree, cultured, egalitarian Britain of his youthful imagination but a darker country entirely. “The stability of democratic society and the possibility of peaceful reform seem more and more threatened by angry workers, students, squatters and even middle-class amenity groups.” He was staggered by his own naivety. “British society — slow-moving, rigid, class-ridden — has proven much harder to change than was supposed … We were optimists then,” the older Crosland wrote. “We soon learnt our lesson.” Maintaining consent for redistribution and generous welfare payments was all too difficult. It is rare to hear a Labour politician speak of this Crosland: crotchety, depressive, mugged by the reality of low growth, oil shocks and “permanently more expensive energy”. But that is the story Healey tells, and told me this week. “He came to the view which has always been mine,” the chancellor said, “that you do need a more interventionist, active state, but one that had a role for the real wealth creators — which is where we come back to profit.” Healey stressed more than once his desire to get out of the way and ease the burdens of tax and regulation on business. He was not suspicious of the profit motive, he said, sounding a little like this line from Socialism Now : “Above all there is often a basic ambivalence on the question of profit.” His challenge, if he is to fulfil the promise splashed on the front of this newspaper yesterday — a budget for “bloody-minded entrepreneurs” — is to do something the older Crosland thought beyond the wit of the Labour Party. “The right balance,” he said in 1974, “has not yet been found between ministerial control and entrepreneurial freedom.” Advertisement Healey and Burnham are trying to create both a strong strategic state and the environment in which business can thrive. If this budget fails to grasp that prize, the risk is that the spending sums in the second half of the parliament just won’t add up. And then they will end up sounding like Crosland: “We shall require higher taxation of the whole better-off section of the community.” Only Healey will be saying it out of necessity, and not conviction. Patrick Maguire was named political journalist of the year at the London Press Club awards Listen to The State of It , Patrick Maguire, Steven Swinford and Lara Spirit’s podcast, here or wherever you get your podcasts