Clement Atlee

7 Key excerpts on "Clement Atlee"

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  eBook - ePub

  Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers

  • Robert Eccleshall, Graham Walker(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Clement Richard Attlee, First Earl of Prestwood Born 4 January 1883, son of Henry Attlee and Ellen Watson. Educated at Haileybury and University College, Oxford. Married 1922 Violet Millar. MP for Limehouse 1922–50, West Walthamstow 1950–5. Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party 1931–5; Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party 1935–55. Mayor of Stepney 1919; Under-Secretary of State for War 1924; Chancellor, Duchy of Lancaster 1930; Postmaster-General 1931; Lord Privy Seal 1940–2; Deputy Prime Minister 1942–5; Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs 1942–3; Lord President of the Council 1943–5; Minister of Defence 1945–6; Prime Minister 1945–51; Leader of the Opposition 1951–5. Left Commons 1955, ennobled the same year. Died 8 October 1967. ‘His limitations are obvious. His virtues and his powers are hidden and unexpected’ (Durbin 1945). Attlee stole upon greatness quietly. As The Times suggested in its obituary, there was an obvious contrast between the scale of the 1945–50 Labour government’s achievements and the diminutive character of its leader: ‘one of the least colourful and most effective of the British Prime Ministers of this century’ (The Times 1967). Attlee’s tenure in Downing Street saw the structure of British domestic and foreign policy transformed, whether through the independence of India, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or domestic achievements such as the maintenance of full employment and the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). In the Labour party—which he led for a record twenty years— there was a similar discrepancy between contemporary impact and retrospective judgement. Some, like Richard Crossman, complained that ‘the cult of personality was replaced by the cult of anonymity’ (Crossman 1961). In an unlikely fashion, however, Attlee became the Keir Hardie of the late-twentieth-century Labour party, the centre of what has been called the ‘deeply-entrenched Attlee myth’ (Morgan 1988:773)

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  British Prime Ministers From Balfour to Brown

  • Robert Pearce, Graham Goodlad(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10  Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Prime Minister: July 1945–October 1951

  ‘People are ceasing to think of him as a “dear little man”. They realise that he has vision and courage and integrity so compelling that it is a force in itself.’

  Diary of Harold Nicolson, 27 April 1949.1

  During the Second World War Conservative MP Walter Elliot remarked that there should be an ‘Attlee Calendar’, with every day of the year accompanied by one of Clement Attlee’s huge store of platitudes, beginning on 1 January with ‘Every avenue will be explored’.2 One might cavil that this form of words was more hackneyed phrase or cliché than platitude, but it is easy to understand what Elliot meant. The Deputy Prime Minister was an exceedingly poor wordsmith. In one speech, he managed to include almost as many clichés as sentences, including ‘socialism without tears’, ‘put first things first’ and ‘strike whilst the iron is hot’.3 On other, more venturesome occasions he did indeed advance into the realm of platitudes. ‘You don’t keep a dog and bark yourself’ was one of his favourites. When questioned about Christianity, he responded curtly that he could not believe in its mumbo-jumbo, but then added the well-used formulaic phrase that he nevertheless ‘believed in the ethics of Christianity’.4

  It is perhaps not surprising that an American journalist described Attlee in 1941 as ‘the dullest man in English politics’.5 As a speaker he compared to Churchill as ‘a village fiddler after Paganini’.6 At key moments during the war Attlee ‘succeeded where lesser men would have failed’ – in making dramatic episodes seem dull and victories sound like defeats.7 If Churchill was ‘the glittering bird of paradise’, noted a colleague, Attlee was ‘a sparrow’,8 though most observers thought of him merely as a mouse. Nevertheless Attlee and the Labour Party beat Churchill and the Conservatives in the 1945 election by a huge majority, and over the next six years Attlee’s administration made fundamental changes in Britain’s society, economy and external policy. Attlee was described in his Times obituary in 1967 as ‘one of the least colourful and most effective of British Prime Ministers of this century’.9

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  Attlee and Churchill

  Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace

  • Leo McKinstry(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  But there has never been a connection like that between Churchill and Attlee. Brought together in the perilous hour of 1940, they forged a partnership that transcended party lines for five years. So important was Attlee to the wartime Coalition that Churchill created a new constitutional position for him as Britain’s first-ever Deputy Prime Minister. In the last years of the war, Attlee became an increasingly powerful figure at the heart of Government, particularly in overseeing plans for national reconstruction. Once victory in Europe had been achieved, the two partners were opponents again, fighting a surprisingly acrimonious campaign in 1945, from which Attlee emerged as the overwhelming victor.

  The man so often dismissed as a mediocrity turned out to be the architect of one of Britain’s most successful reforming administrations. Under his unobtrusive leadership, the Labour Government embarked on a wide-ranging programme of change, from the creation of the National Health Service to the award of independence for India. It is a measure of Attlee’s achievement that when Churchill regained power, in October 1951, he reversed little of Labour’s post-war settlement despite his frequent denunciations of socialism.

  A five-year partnership between two Leaders, followed by a decade of political strife, is unparalleled and unlikely ever to be repeated. Attlee and Churchill led their respective parties for a combined total of thirty-five years, an aggregate unmatched by any other pair of opponents in the history of British democracy. What adds to the peerless quality of their long rule is the breadth of their success. Other dualities, like that of Bonar Law and Lloyd George in the First World War and its immediate aftermath, were mired in gloomy controversy and failure. But the premierships of Churchill and Attlee were among the most romantic, uplifting episodes in Britain’s story, when the nation clung on to its independence against overwhelming odds and then, having emerged undefeated from the exhausting struggle, embarked on the epic task of building a better society. If Churchill was the giant of the war, Attlee was the hero of the peace. In a sense, the two men represented different sides of the best of the English character. Churchill, quivering with martial spirit, showed that same courageous determination which had led to the victories like Agincourt and Waterloo; Attlee, on the other hand, embodied those quintessentially English qualities of decency, stoicism, fair play and dislike of ostentation.

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  The Black Door

  Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers

  • Richard Aldrich, Rory Cormac(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • William Collins

    (Publisher)

  6

  Clement Attlee (1945–1951)

  Are they not possibly for sale?

  Clement Attlee1

  Clement Attlee spent his time in office busily scuttling between competing priorities. Labour’s first post-war prime minister is best remembered for successful domestic reform in the face of severe impecuniousness, and for engineering Britain’s miraculous ‘Escape from Empire’ while under pressure from nationalist unrest in India. Crucially, however, Attlee also presided over the early Cold War – a burgeoning conflict that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. His choices, especially on security, had ramifications for generations to come. Following the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the Cold War created increasingly serious responsibilities for the new prime minister. With the advent of the Korean War the following year, all-out confrontation seemed only weeks away.

  The Cold War placed a high premium on intelligence. Successive prime ministers needed to know the Soviet Union’s capabilities and intentions, including its nuclear arsenals and technological developments – and, crucially, whether it would use them. A great deal was at stake. Intelligence also had a more active, and potentially explosive, role to play. It became crucial in fighting a large-scale underground struggle. With open warfare now too dangerous to contemplate, conflict was forced into a lower key. Subversion, espionage, insurgency and propaganda became the weapons of choice. Clement Attlee was the first prime minister to be forced to adjust to this ‘hot peace’, and to recognise its implications for the active use of intelligence in peacetime. He was well aware of the difficulties. Spoilt by the Ultra material during the war, the new government had to adapt to a lack of high-grade intelligence, since it was not reading many Soviet communications. GCHQ, as GC&CS had become in 1946, could not provide direct insights into the mind of the enemy. Attlee himself privately acknowledged that ‘The difficulties in dealing with Communist activities are far greater than anything which we have had to face before, for the iron curtain is very hard to penetrate.’2

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  Attlee's Labour Governments 1945-51

  • Robert Pearce(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is often said that Attlee lacked any real understanding of economics. This was true (and equally true of most of his predecessors as premier, and not a few of his successors); but at least he had the humility to recognise deficiencies and take the advice of those better qualified than himself. He was in this, as in so many respects, the antithesis of Ramsay MacDonald. He once mused that it is always a mistake to think yourself bigger than you are. Attlee's self-knowledge ruled out this error. He combined considerable abilities with habits of hard work. As a result he was always well-informed, and everyone recognised that he was solid and efficient. Above all, he was an excellent chairman of cabinet with a remarkable ability to get through an agenda and, when necessary, to silence over-talkative colleagues. Democracy means government by discussion; but Attlee was aware that unless people know when to stop talking democracy can degenerate into discussion without government.

  Attlee's political position tended to be in the centre of his party. Certainly he was a reformer, with a genuine concern to improve the lot of the poor. He had entered politics by way of social work in the East End of London; appalled at avoidable poverty, he wished to see a more caring and more equal society. Yet while wanting change, he was also in many ways a conservative figure, a product of public school and Oxford and of the late-Victorian era. He was even said to shudder when the port was passed round the dining table the wrong way. He therefore stood for stability as well as reform and may be seen as personifying Labour's essential ambiguity of aim and outlook.

  Attlee proved the doubters wrong. He survived as Prime Minister for six years, and his reputation stood much higher at the end of this period than at the beginning. The teacher had been promoted in popular esteem: the Observer

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  Ernest Bevin

  Labour's Churchill

  • Andrew Adonis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  115 CHAPTER 5 ATTLEE B evin’s creation of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1920s was improvisation as much as creativity. The same was to happen in the 1930s in the forging of his partnership with Clement Attlee, which propelled them both to the pinnacle of the British state. Bevin created Attlee as leader of the Labour Party in 1935 by chance as much as design. But he kept him in situ thereafter with ruthless determination. It was Bevin’s decisive intervention to remove Lansbury in 1935 and to stop Morrison in 1945 that promoted Attlee both times. He stopped at least four other attempts to remove Attlee and never sought the Labour leadership himself, although he could probably have secured it. This set the scene for the close and respectful eleven-year partnership between Ernie and Clem at the top of the two transformational governments of the 1940s. It only ended with Bevin’s death in April 1951, which severely weakened Attlee and possibly sealed his defeat in the very close October 1951 election. It all started with scorched earth. Labour was eviscerated at the polls in October 1931, reduced to just fifty-two seats against 554 for 116 the MacDonald–Baldwin National Government. George Lansbury became party leader after the election as almost the last man standing. Henderson, thrust into the leadership by MacDonald’s defection in August, had lost his seat in Burnley by 8,200 votes and Lansbury was the only member of the outgoing Labour Cabinet to survive. Attlee became deputy leader for the same reason, as one of only two junior ministers to hold on; the other, Sir Stafford Cripps, had only entered the Commons a few months previously in a by-election. Attlee had been re-elected by just 551 votes in Limehouse

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  New Labour's Pasts

  The Labour Party and Its Discontents

  • James E. Cronin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The party's reluctance to embrace the new during the 1950s and early 1960s was deeply embedded in its unique past and anchored in its unusual structure, but it was reinforced by the circumstances in which Labour found itself in opposition. Most important was the powerful legacy of achievement bequeathed to the party by the governments of 1945–51. By almost any standard, the Attlee governments were a resounding success. Labour had been elected in 1945 on a series of pledges that were fulfilled almost to the letter. The party promised to create a genuine welfare state by reorganising existing social services, by adding programmes for those previously left out, and by the establishment of the National Health Service. All this they did. The party also promised to implement policies that would maintain a 'high and stable' level of employment. This, too, came to pass, even if it is difficult to know precisely whom, or what, to credit for the achievement. The party also committed itself to keeping in place a variety of policies – in terms of taxation, price controls, controls over land and rents, regional policy –aimed at making Britain a fairer and more egalitarian society. These promises were also kept, even at the cost of some popular resentment and loud opposition from the Tories, from business and from the self-appointed spokesmen of the middle classes.

  Not only did Labour deliver on its promises. The Labour governments of 1945–51 also presided successfully over a difficult transition from war to peace and proved beyond doubt the party's capacity to govern. There were bad moments, of course: the fuel and exchange crises of 1947 were the worst; and the devaluation of the pound in 1949 was a wise move that nonetheless was often portrayed as a failure. And there were divisions and unseemly squabbles as well: over NHS charges, over foreign policy and over rearmament. But for the most part, Labour governed in a reasonably unified fashion over a recovering Britain in which things were steadily and visibly improving. The Attlee governments thus left a record of which the party could be justly proud and around which there quickly grew up a memory that undoubtedly exaggerated the successes, minimised the weaknesses, and put a retrospective shine on activities whose lustre might well not have elicited praise from contemporary observers. Historians have understandably sought to right the balance and to restore the nuances to the picture of Labour's achievement, but it remains the case that at the core of the heroic memory was a solid set of accomplishments.1

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