I failed to credit Andrew Gimson as the author of the spoof news items referred to yesterday. Later in the BH broadcast, the Conservative Gimson was joined by his wife Sally, then a Labour councillor in Camden.
My parents came from different political traditions. Early on in their relationship I gather, they agreed that they would never discuss politics in the interests of a harmonious marriage. The Gimsons take an opposite line, being very open about their differences as a brief spat during the programme's review of the papers showed. Both approaches clearly work as I see that the Gimsons are still together and only death separated my parents.
Just as I feel that my parents' personal philosophies were closer than their party allegiances would suggest, so the Gimsons agreed on some basic issues. After Andrew stressed the need for a system of cooperation in Europe, Sally reinforced the message: "Every time in history when we pull out of Europe, when we become separate, when we say we want to be a sovereign nation and we don't want to be part of Europe and we won't take part in what happens in Europe, things go wrong."
That was a view held by Denis Healey, of whom an appreciation closed the programme (the last ten minutes or so). Healey had just died at the age of 98. As historian Peter Hennessy pointed out, Healey spanned post-war British history. Presenter Paddy O'Connell observed that Healey's generation "had gone, that we are dealing with people who leave university and go straight into politics. Hardly anyone has served in a boardroom or on a battlefield." Hennessy responded with the reflection in 1988 by Willie Whitelaw, who was of the same generation, that "the big divide in politics now is not left or right, wet or dry, it's the generation that grew up in the slump and in the war and the one that didn't".
Denis Healey had been a beach-master at Anzio. (See "Anzio Landing" in the National War Museum's description of the Italian campaign.) Like so many people involved in the strike against the Axis powers who later went into politics, Healey believed in the European ideal, that tying nations together in economic bonds that they could not break would end the centuries of bitter conflict in Europe. The Italian campaign was particularly nasty. I have posted about this before, and also about the military administration which restored order to Sicily sans Mafia and sans Fascists.
Sadly, the passing of the first of Whitelaw's generations has affected Italy, too. The history of the last century has been forgotten or ignored, leading to the rise of the Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers in Italy) party, tipped to win next Sunday's general election in the country. Although its leader, Giorgia Meloni, describes her party as a moderate conservative one, liberal and Jewish groups point out that it includes many extremists. Italy's only partly proportional voting system may give this resurgent party control over one of the founder members of the European Common Market and its successors. The tensions raised by the result in Sweden's election may increase.
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