Ali Khosravi
This year marks a century since Clement Attlee was first elected to Parliament. By 1935 he had risen to the party’s leadership in Parliament. Yet none of his contemporaries (or probably even himself) ever expected him to one day serve as Deputy Prime Minister during a world war, or to lead Labour’s first ever majority government after the landslide of 1945. His government transformed post-war Britain and altered the relationship between the citizen and the state with the creation of the National Health Service and the welfare system. His legacies also include the nuclear deterrent and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) he helped found, the last having recently become particularly topical, for tragic reasons. But can Clement Attlee offer us any lessons for today’s Labour Party? The modesty man that he was (and there seems to be a historical consensus on his modesty) would have found the idea of being a role model from beyond the grave absurd. Owing to his modesty, he was often underestimated by his contemporaries. Such a quiet and unpretentious man was seemingly overshadowed by big personalities like Ernest Bevin, Nye
Bevan and Herbert Morrison, each of whom would have at points felt themselves more suitable than Attlee ‘for the job’. But Attlee’s effectiveness as a leader and as Prime Minister was precisely due to his palpable absence of ego. He was a man driven by an almost paternalistic sense of public service. Just to get a sense of his modesty, we may look at the fact that he housed a Jewish child refugee in his family home, something which was consciously concealed from anybody outside his family until discovered years later. You may compare that attitude with our current political culture where politicians pose for photos when they donate tins of food to their local food banks and post them on social media. Attlee came from a comfortably establishment background, as a product of Victorian ‘public schooling’. Indeed as an undergraduate in Oxford, he is said to have been something of a young Tory, with a romantic view of the British Empire. So it can be seen as a strange twist of fate that he rose to become the Labour Prime Minister who helped to dismantle the British Empire after the Second World War, Page 8
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What Clement Attlee Can Teach Us Today
