Although I am a Labour voter, I have to admit that the Conservatives give the impression of being a better home for both women and people from ethnic minorities. Only four people – all men, all white – have won power as Labour leaders yet the Conservatives have had three female leaders (who have all become Prime Minister) and, if rumour is true, they may have a fourth before long. Kemi Badenoch, who is both female and black, is said to be favourite to be their next leader if, as expected, Rishi Sunak, who is brown, loses the next election.
Labour has had six Prime Ministers, two of them having inherited the role. The four who won elections were Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. The first was MacDonald, who was reviled for having agreed to form a national government with the hated Tories and was actually expelled from the party he had helped to found with Kier Hardie (after whom Starmer was named). Wilson was a clever fixer and a shrewd politician who was Prime Minister four times and Blair held office for ten years before handing over to Gordon Brown.
However, it was Attlee who led the post-war Labour government and probably made the most significant changes of all four of them. It was under Attlee that the National Health Service was started, many major industries were nationalised and the taxation of the rich was increased. This increase continued under Wilson to lengths which now seem both punitive and impossible and which seemed to show that Labour was the high tax party, willing to hit the rich with high marginal rates, maybe not so good at stimulating the economy to help people earn.
I read Attlee’s autobiography recently. It is safe to say that it is not an exciting read. Attlee was ‘a safe pair of hands’ who effected a lot of radical changes in society despite being a small c conservative in appearance. I did not see the film but Ken Loach, a noted left-wing film-maker, produced a homage to the post-war Labour government of Attlee some years ago. What received less publicity was that Attlee had not objected to the Americans dropping of the atom bomb and that he allowed British soldiers to be sent to fight in Korea.
Attlee himself had fought in the First World War and, had it not been for a lucky illness, may well have paid with his life, having been in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign which was attributed to Winston Churchill. Later Attlee was to serve under Churchill as his deputy during the Second World War. Afterwards he defeated his former boss in the 1945 election and then brought the atom bomb to Britain. Labour governments are often more bellicose than Conservative, as the Iraq war, where Tony Blair supported the American invasion of Iraq, proved.
Attlee had proved to be a loyal and able deputy to Churchill during the years of the Second World War. Their duties were divided into running the country and running the war. After Germany had been defeated – but before Japan surrendered – Attlee’s Labour party beat the Conservatives by a thumping margin. It was before the days of opinion polls and people are still sometimes surprised at how comprehensively Churchill’s government was defeated.
I remember Barbara Castle, who was a cabinet member in a later Labour government, said that people might have voted Churchill back in out of gratitude but not his party. In Britain you do not vote for a president as the Americans do (we have a monarch for that job) but for a party to run the country. People felt it was time for a change and entrusted Attlee not his former boss Churchill to effect the changes needed – particularly founding the NHS.
Winning elections is not about preaching to the choir but, under our electoral system at least, involves persuading floating voters in marginal constituencies to vote for you. I suspect that these are not the most sophisticated voters and that they do not spend a lot time perusing manifestos and commitments but make their voting decisions on very a very visceral level, often reacting to their perception of the character of a party’s leader. That Blair (or Thatcher or Attlee) seems ok and I will vote for him/her as ‘a safe pair of hands’.
Attlee, who went to a public school and practiced as a lawyer, came from a background where a strong sense of public duty was expected. His very dullness was actually a recommendation to people who would not otherwise have trusted some of the more fiery radical figures he was surrounded with, but whom he allowed to get on with the business of founding the NHS, which doctors now swear by but which many of them swore at when it was started. As its founder Aneurin (Nye) Bevan said he would ‘stuff their mouths with gold’ to win them over. And he did.
Attlee was far more complimentary about Churchill than hw was about MacDonald. One of his last public duties was attending Churchill's funeral, where he caught a chill and died soon after. Attlee never made MacDonald's mistake of sacrificing socialist values for the sake of national unity. He showed no embarrassment about using the word ‘socialist’ to describe his views. At a certain level, however, he knew that he had to reassure rather than alienate those floating voters if he was going to get things done. He too was a doer and we are still grateful for what he did.
Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
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