Clement Attlee was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1945 – 1951.
He defeated Winston Churchill in the General Election that immediately followed
the end of World War II, having served under him as Deputy Prime Minister in
the wartime coalition. Here are three striking things about him:
He had great integrity and was widely trusted by people across the
political spectrum.
He could be forthright, decisive and was virtually charisma-free.
He oversaw one of the most radical governments in our history, carrying
through a programme of legislative reform that transformed British society and left
a legacy still with us today.
This blog post is prompted by John Bew’s magnificent biography Citizen Clem. It charts Attlee’s life
from a 14-year-old boy proudly joining the crowds celebrating Queen Victoria‘s
Golden Jubilee in 1887 and basking in the ‘glory‘ of the British Empire (on
which the sun never set!) through to the first major step in dismantling that
empire with Indian independence in 1946.
Citizen Clem takes us through
Attlee’s years of
service and brushes with death as a young officer in the First World War, at
Gallipoli, in the Middle East and finally in France;
his long political
apprenticeship between the wars, working with the poor and dispossessed in the
ethnically-mixed districts of Limehouse and Stepney in London’s East End,
riding out the challenges from the Fascists on the right and the Communists on
the left;
his rise in the
Labour Party culminating in his election as its leader in 1935;
his subsequent rejection
of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and taking his party into the wartime
coalition with the Conservatives.
It documents the strains and struggles of the fight against Hitler
and his allies and, in particular, Attlee’s important role as Churchill’s Deputy
and a firm but friendly critic; his unswerving support for Indian independence: his
party’s surprise victory in 1945 with the first-ever overall Labour majority in
Parliament of 146 seats; how he chose of the key figures in his administration:
Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton,
and so on, how he gave them their heads and managed their rivalries and egos.
I was a fairly mindless teenager at the time and the members of
Attlee’s cabinet were simply names to me. I had no understanding of their
politics, their personalities, or their achievements. My father was a staunch
member of the Conservative Party and not surprisingly Labour politicians didn’t
get a very sympathetic hearing in our household. So to read this lively,
entertaining and intelligent biography has been a startling revelation about
the history of my times and had given me a sense of pride in the values Attlee
stood for that still resonate with me 70 years later. To explain Citizen Clem’s philosophy, I will end this post with some short extracts
from its Prologue and first chapter.
“One of the major themes of
this book is that patriotism was the glue that bound together so much of what
Attlee did.”
“… the aim of this book is
not to review and reinterpret all the decisions made by Attlee as a politician,
to chart the ‘road to `45’, or to provide another critical assessment of his
government’s programme. … Instead the goal is to get deeper inside his
brain and his heart … to unpack those
contents and tell a larger story through them. This is to appreciate what Attlee
himself called ‘ the importance of the human factor in society as against the
mechanics’.
“If something is
salvageable from his government’s legislation, it is ethos rather than process.
This unobtrusive progressive patriotism – built on a sense of rights and
duties, malleable civic code rather than a legal writ, with its emphasis on the
‘common wealth’ above individual self-fulfilment – bound together everything
that Attlee did. It has been scuffed and worn down over the years. It may live
on in Britain, in some unfashionable form, but it does not have an Attlee to
give it coherence.”
“Above all, it was a sense
of patriotism that underpinned Attlee’s socialism. It should be made clear that
this was a worldview that rejected uncritical chauvinistic jingoism or
imperialism – ugly by-products of nationalism that encouraged racism or
undercut the fellowship of man. Such was the horror of the First World War that
he once dreamed of a ‘world state’ in which individual countries would pool
their sovereignty. Nevertheless, he believed that love of country could be a
noble and unifying thing.
Captain Clement Attlee,
small in frame and thin in voice, shot in the buttocks as he carried the red
flag over the top in 1916, may not be the greatest Briton of the twentieth
century. This book argues that he has a good claim to be its first-ranked
citizen.”
