CLEMENT ATTLEE - A DULL BUT ELECTABLE FIGURE

Attlee, reformer who looked like a solicitor

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

 

 

NEW NAMES FOR OLD ILLS

Churchill who suffered from 'depression'

When I went to school, you could either spell or you could not. (I write as one who has sometimes misspelled words and relies on Word to tell me when I have got it wrong.) Then something called dyslexia appeared and, before long, what had once seemed mere incompetence had a fancy medical name attached to it and was nobody’s fault. 

Likewise, if you ran away from combat in the First or Second World Wars, you were considered a coward and were often shot for desertion. (Again, I write as someone who has never fought in a military conflict and am aware that I have little right to judge others.) Then we introduced shell-shock which meant that cowardice no longer existed. By giving something a medical name, we effectively stopped judging people for lack of moral fibre.

 

A mother once excused her child’s rowdy behaviour by saying that he was on the autism spectrum and had little self-control. It was not really his fault that he was behaving badly - and spoiling things for other people – because of a medical name for his condition. Pretty soon nobody will bear any responsibility for what they do because you can attach a medical name to what used to be a moral fault and thus remove the element of blame from it.

Similarly, nobody is ever in a bad mood now. Instead they suffer from depression, which never used to exist - although Winston Churchill did admit to being afflicted by the 'black dog'. Bruce Springsteen forgave his father for his bad moods because he was able to attach a medical definition to the process. He was not surly or bad tempered but suffered from 'depression'. 

 

I am, as those who have read this far may be aware, dubious about this whole process. We eventually won the First World War because of a variety of factors, not least American involvement, but also because men were expected to go ‘over the top’, sometimes to almost certain death from enemy fire. Being unwilling to do so meant that you were considered a coward and dealt with accordingly, which usually meant the firing squad.

 

This was the harsh reality of a war that cost the lives of nearly a million men in the British forces, less than a tenth of the total military casualties. And this does not include civilian deaths which brought the figure up to fourteen or fifteen million altogether. This is an unimaginable amount of death in today’s terms and begs the question of whether it was worth it in the end. Many parents were keen to send their sons into the conflict, not least Rudyard Kipling, whose only son Jack was killed in his first taste of combat, one that left a shadow over the life of the poet and short story writer, one that never really lifted. 

 

Kipling effectively sacrificed his own son who, like his father, suffered from poor eyesight and could easily have escaped military service. Yet both father and son were keen that Jack should ‘do his bit’ rather than be stained by the suggestion that he was a coward and could not face up to his responsibilities as a soldier. On such determination was victory eventually achieved against the might of a militaristic Germany that needed to be stopped from taking over Europe – and eventually the whole world – completely. Contempt for what soldiers called cowardice and the willingness to shoot deserters was sadly an essential part of this.

 

Do we lose something by being understanding of the causes of what used to be called cowardice but is now known as shell shock, what used to be called bad spelling but is now diagnosed as dyslexia and was once bad behaviour but is not called being on the autism spectrum? The inevitable end result of this is that nobody has to take responsibility for anything they do with their hands because they are suffering from a medical – rather than a moral – condition which affects what is going on in their heads.  

The end result of this was seen in an American trial when the perpetrator’s lawyers claimed that he had a gene that determined his actions – which were not disputed and involved killing a woman who was unable to defend herself. Yet what is a gene but a determinant of the actions by which we are judged. ‘Use every man after his deserts and who shall ‘scape whipping?’ asks Hamlet in Shakespeare’s plays. (He is talking about the players and Polonius’s promise to do just that.) We all have a lot to be ashamed about – not least this writer – and we should be grateful that we are not always judged too harshly.

 

This begs the question of who a human being is: a moral being who takes responsibility for his or her actions or a collection of genes who cannot be held responsible for such actions. Not only do I believe that we are the former but I think that we have to treat ourselves as such or else nobody can ever do anything simply bad and thus can never be judged.  

 

Yet, at a certain point, we have to subject ourselves to judgement or society ceases to function. Just as the British side would not have own the First World War if they had recognised the concept of shell shock rather than labelling it simply as cowardice, so no justice system could survive if the argument that we should be excused out actions because of our genes was allowed to hold sway. It did not in the end but it did allow the plaintiff to receive a life rather than a death sentence. He was white, incidentally, and I doubt if he would have been shown such understanding if his skin had been of a darker colour. 

 

By all means, use a person’s medical condition to extend understanding towards them. But there comes a time when you have to stop excusing people and start judging them. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com