Clement Attlee

Volume 4 | Issue 4 - Forgotten People

Article written by Josephine Vincent. Edited and researched by Liam Brake.

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Britain from 1945-1951, suffered from widespread underestimation, as he was constantly pitted against the flamboyant character Churchill, making him appear modest in comparison. Members of his own Labour Party even conspired to have him overthrown, including Herbert Morrison, who warned Attlee that he was prepared to stand against him in a leadership contest, as a more “suitable” candidate for the post. Regardless of the underwhelming response Attlee received during his lifetime, the continuing legacy that he left behind renders him the only Prime Minister, apart from Margaret Thatcher, who permanently transformed British society during their administration.

Attlee’s staunchly socialist policies left a permanent legacy; so much so that although Conservatives overwhelmingly dominated leadership positions in British politics; British society remained shaped by the policies introduced in the Attlee years. Atlee himself was a staunch conservative until he worked as a manager for Haileybury House, a charitable club for working class boys in London’s East End. Horrified at the poverty and deprivation he witnessed whilst working with slum children there, he permanently altered his political stand; private charity would never alleviate poverty alone: the state had to intervene through massive income redistribution. Attlee remained highly critical of the ills of capitalist society throughout his lifetime, once commenting that “man’s material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress.”

Attlee orchestrated a highly successful domestic policy with socialist goals in mind, and is one of the few governments in modern British history that can actually say that it achieved all the major goals it set out to accomplish. In 1948, Attlee’s health secretary Aneurin Bevan established the National Health Service, in spite of massive opposition from the medical establishment. For the first time, poor families were able to receive publicly funded healthcare without “means testing”: where poor families had to prove their eligibility before receiving free healthcare. The NHS treated 8.5 million dental patients and distributed more than 5 million pairs of glasses in its first year of operation alone, whilst deaths from pneumonia and TB were also significantly reduced. The NHS is one major aspect of the Attlee legacy which continues to the present day: if a politician declares that they do not support it, it can mean the end for their political career. Even Thatcher, despite her numerous cuts to other areas of the public sector, left the NHS untouched out of necessity for her political survival.

Every British citizen has benefitted at some point in their lives from the numerous welfare state reforms introduced. Attlee set out to correct the vices of British society laid out in the 1946 Beveridge Report, starting with the 1946 National Insurance Act, in which people paid a flat rate of National Insurance in return for flat-rate pensions, sickness benefits, unemployment benefit and funeral benefit, as well as increases in aid to deprived children, elderly people and the handicapped. The immediate effect of this was massive decreases in rates of infant mortality, and an increased life expectancy.

The Attlee government made great strides in improving women’s circumstances, and improving their opportunities: the 1949 Married Women (Restraint upon Restriction Act) was passed to “render inoperative any restrictions attached to the enjoyment of property by a woman,” making women more financially independent. Various measures were also carried out to improve conditions for workers: the nationalisation of key industries during the Attlee years, including coal, steel and the railways brought significant material benefits to workers, including higher wages, reduced working hours, and much safer working conditions. The notoriously dangerous mining industry was given some much needed reforms, including a ban on boys under 16 being allowed to go underground.

Moreover, in the face of foreign policy, Attlee remained unafraid to propose new ideas which disregarded the status quo. Although he was as equally opposed to the “Red Terror” as every other mainstream politician, he notably one proposed that “if the money wasted on arms could be used to help the less developed nations, that would probably be a greater blow against the Communist danger than anything else.”

The Attlee government oversaw the beginning of post-war immigration to the UK, through the advertising to members of former colonies who wished to work in the UK, including the 1948 Empire Windrush, which carried 493 Jamaicans wishing to start a new life in Britain, and has since become one of the most enduring symbols of multiculturalism in Britain.

Attlee and is government deserves credit not only because it was able to carry out all of its desires reforms in the most dire economic circumstances; it also deserves credit as it offered assistance to those who truly needed it- the most vulnerable in society, and it did much to dramatically increase their circumstances. Although Attlee didn’t succeed in entirely transforming British society into a socialist one, it did succeed in implementing a number of permanently enduring socialist legacies.

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