 Clement Attlee: moved post-war Britain towards a fairer, decent society
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First among equals in the Premier league
As Tony Blair’s time as Prime Minister draws to a close, Geoffrey Goodman reflects on a different kind of Labour leader, Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee by Francis Beckett. Methuen £14.99 (paperback) order this book
DURING these final weeks of Tony Blair’s premiership I have been re-reading Francis Beckett’s excellent updated edition of his masterly biography of Clement Attlee, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister in office with power after the 1945 General Election.
It is a salutory reminder to those of us who voted, as I did, for the first time in July 1945. Many of us were still in uniform awaiting demobilisation after the Second World War.
All over the world men and women in the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force put their crosses on specially provided ballot papers which were then packed into containers and flown back to Britain. Collecting the HM Forces vote meant the result of the election was delayed for some three weeks before the great Attlee triumph was announced.
I will never forget the rejoicing when that result was finally relayed round the globe. Even my friends who had voted Tory or Liberal were genuinely excited by the prospect of the New Jerusalem heralded by Labour’s astonishing victory.
My Conservative-voting fellow RAF colleagues were apprehensive – though not dismayed.
Almost everywhere it was regarded as a New Dawn for our nation, as indeed it was when the curtain lifted on the Attlee Government’s social revolution, arguably the most historic political development Britain experienced in the 20th century.
What is especially interesting about Beckett’s updated version of his original book (first published in 1997, note that date) is the author’s fresh introduction.
In this he admits that in the 10 years since the book was first published he has learned much more about the importance and significance of Clem Attlee’s achievements as Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951.
Beckett was born on May 12, 1945, four days after VE Day, and one month before Attlee became Prime Minister.
He was a child growing up in Attlee’s ‘New Britain’ and, as he reflects: “We did not realise that we were living in New Jerusalem. Before the Attlee government, working-class parents could not afford the doctor and relied on folk remedies – old wives’ tales – to treat their children’s ailments.
“Working-class children in the 1930s seldom had enough to eat and received just enough education to enable them to do routine work…”
This was the challenge Attlee and his 1945 Government faced – plus a truth which only now is being adequately understood, that Britain in 1945 was virtually a bankrupt nation, weary and tired from its war-time exertions and survival.
Yet, somehow, the country was galvanised into recovery by the strong and committed leadership of a remarkable Government.
Beckett’s fascinating and and extremely well-researched biography of the man at the helm during that period ought to be essential reading for every young schoolteacher in Britain today.
It is a crucial part of our modern history and, if I might add at this somewhat late stage, it would have been beneficial for our outgoing Prime Minister to have had Beckett’s book by his bedside when he took office 10 years ago.
Whether it would have influenced Tony Blair’s premiership is another question.
Yes it is undeniable that the Britain over which Tony Blair has presided in the past 10 years has been a very different country to the one Attlee and his government ruled.
To be sure Blair required, and developed, a quite different agenda. I make no complaint about that.
Yet, even allowing for all that, when you consider Attlee’s 1945 agenda – and how his government went about transforming and improving our nation despite the economic bankruptcy it faced – and then match that against the Blair agenda and achievements during his three governments in the past decade, with economic prosperity as his foundation stone, it is impossible to escape the following conclusion. Despite Blair’s unique success of winning three elections in a row for Labour, his 10 years in Downing Street simply don’t hold a candle to Attlee’s six years in that same, albeit modernised, building.
You have only to read this book to appreciate that truth. Nor was Clem Attlee some special miracle man. His background was not very dissimilar from Tony Blair’s.
His father, Henry Attlee, was a respected middle-class London solicitor (not unlike Blair’s father) and after public school education and distinguished army service in the First World War (he was the last but one soldier to leave Gallipoli) Major Attlee followed his father into a law practice.
He spent most of his time working in London’s East End among the poor where his old school, Haileybury, had established a house to provide food and shelter for the poor.
That house was in Limehouse, where, at the 1922 General Election, Clem Attlee won his first Parliamentary seat, defeating the sitting Conservative member. Limehouse was his political launch pad.
In 1935, when the Labour Party was in the doldrums after the 1931 collapse under Ramsay MacDonald, Attlee was elected Labour’s leader, beating Herbert Morrison and Arthur Greenwood.
Then came the war years with Churchill taking over from Chamberlain and Attlee becoming Churchill’s second-in- command.
It was an astonishing rise for this quiet, modest, rather introverted figure, who until 1935 had never been regarded as more than an also-ran among Labour MPs, often confessing to be more interested in poetry than political jostling.
This was the man, the leader of the 1945 Labour Government, who did more than any other Prime Minister with the possible exception of David Lloyd George (who did most of his radical reforms as Chancellor of the Exchequer) to move Britain toward a fairer, more decent society.
That is the message which comes powerfully through the pages of this excellent biography.
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