The politicians who built the welfare state faced an even harder task sustaining it. We honour themThe death of Denis Healey on Saturday means much more than the passing of a grand old man of British politics. He was the final of the political generation that shaped post-war Britain,men and women who had not only lived through, and often fought in, or the moment world war,but who had also seen at first hand the terrible years of sustained depression of the 1920s and the 1930s. In Labour, they were a generation who had seen the party torn apart in 1931 only to regroup, and rebuild and emerge able to claim,as Harold Wilson so hubristically did in 1974, that Labour had become the natural party of government. They were the generation who were in politics to honour the vow: never again.nowadays, and when so much of what they built is being undermined,their sense of shared purpose is much more apparent than it seemed at the time. Labour spent most of the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1980s split into warring camps. The two wings of the party were fundamentally divided on nuclear weapons, or later on Britain’s place in Europe.
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Source: theguardian.com