Stoppard and Healey

A couple of (unrelated) items of interest:

Tom Stoppard writes in The Times of Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus:

The EU has made Belarus its business, and is offering entry in exchange for Belarus adopting European standards on a slate of freedoms. Lukashenko, the former manager of a collective farm, who has manipulated the constitution to keep himself in office, shows no sign of being tempted. He has his problems with his other powerful neighbour (President Putin recently doubled the price of the gas supply) but Russia in its present mode has no problem with his Humpty Dumpty way with words, or with his “democratic republic”, which has more policemen per head than anywhere else in the world.

My comment is not about the thuggish and stupid autocrat who is the subject of Stoppard's piece. It is praise of Stoppard. His work over decades for liberty and human rights in Eastern Europe is unusual as political activity in the theatrical profession goes. It's dogged and informed, and born of personal experience. If he had done nothing else in this field, his translation and popularising of the drama of Vaclav Havel would be a literary and humanitarian achievement in itself. I particularly recommend his adaptation (not that I can read Czech) of Havel's play Largo Desolato, 1984, which depicts a philosopher buffeted by agents of the state to renounce his work and supporters to stand by it.

The political correspondent Elinor Goodman has a profile of Denis Healey for BBC News Online. Healey is approaching his 90th birthday. He has been, and is, wrong on many things. It remains a matter of controversy whether he fought hard enough for social democratic principles during Labour's convulsions of the 1980s. I believe he and James Callaghan were of great significance for the British Left in government in the 1970s. In acknowledging that inflation was the principal enemy of an advance in social conditions, they initiated the long task of establishing credible economic management in the UK by governments of both parties. But I marvelled at the time, and still do, why Healey compromised to such an extent with Labour's anti-nuclear policies of the 1980s. The sympathetic (and alarmingly badly edited) 2002 biography of Healey by Edward Pearce avoids mentioning Healey's reported statement that the Russians were "praying for a Labour victory" in the 1987 general election. (That comment certainly caused Mrs Thatcher satisfaction - see The Downing Street Years, p. 576.)

Few would deny, however - and I would vigorously assert - that Healey is one of the most important of postwar British statesmen, whose contribution to public life has been immense. For me, two aspects of that life stand out: Healey's evangelism for the arts (his famous "hinterland"), and his work as International Secretary of the Labour Party immediately after WW2. The latter sounds a bureaucratic function. It was in fact a vital role in the support that Labour gave to free trade unions and democratic parties on both sides of the Iron Curtain in trying to resist Soviet expansionism. It was not obvious when Labour took office in 1945 that it would ally with the United States rather than attempt a doomed search for a Third Way in foreign policy. It was much to the credit of Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and - as Bevin's aide - Healey that they perceived the obduracy of Soviet Communism so early.