'What Clement Attlee Can Teach Us Today' - Ali Khosravi

'What Clement Attlee Can Teach Us Today' - 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, having forced Churchill to include the principle of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter (which arguably became the basis of the United Nations). As Prime Minister, Attlee also insisted on bringing forward the timetable for Indian Independence, which was opposed by Churchill’s Conservatives.

That episode alone, aside from the rest of his career, may remind us about the importance of giving people the chance for redemption: the chance to undergo journeys, through which they may change their views and mend their ways. It can restore our faith (as people on the political left) in the importance of rehabilitation which may sometimes be taken for granted. It demonstrates why individuals should not be eternally encumbered by the sins of their youth and should instead be given a second chance.

In terms of his principles, if they could be called Attleeism, Attlee synthesised cautious radicalism with an unashamed sense of patriotism. He was unquestionably a cautiously radical child of the British establishment. He would not have had the almost clichéd working class backstory which seems to characterise modern day leadership contests. But that didn’t make him any less aware or less angry at the poverty and the social injustice he witnessed. He found his radicalism in the streets of London’s East End before the First World War, where he worked as a social worker.

Attlee was also notoriously a man of few words. He was described by his peers as enigmatic. It can be argued that he was a skilled practitioner of ‘constructive ambiguity’ decades before Henry Kissinger theorised it. Something which the current leadership may have also inherited. We can almost certainly say that had Attlee been around in the 2020s, he would not have had a Twitter account.

Another of his character traits was his sense of respect and grace towards his opponents which he may have got from his work in the wartime coalition alongside the Tories. We know that he wouldn’t have been a fan of what is termed ‘opposition for opposition’s sake’. He is said to have lost faith in Nye Bevan’s leadership potential after Bevan made his infamous comments about Tories being “lower than vermin”. To this Attlee reportedly replied that ‘we may disagree with the Tories on public policy but you can’t doubt their patriotism’. I heard that sentiment repeated when Barry Gardiner generously gave us a talk in Hilary Term. “Never assume that your opponents are evil,” Gardiner said.

It is fair to say that Attlee was to an extent a product of his age, as indeed we all are. His methods were particularly suited to the age of radio and newspapers. We may not feasibly be able to directly copy and paste the Attleeist mode of operation and style. But he still offers a lot of valuable lessons for us today. His synthesis of patriotism with radicalism is indeed a very important framework. His modesty is a virtue to be promoted and celebrated as much as possible. In the words of Attlee’s American counterpart, President Truman: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”. And that was particularly true of Attlee. He accomplished a lot and didn’t seem to care about personal credit.

For me, that is the most important lesson: the subordination of personal ego to public duty and the subordination of the player to the game. Those are the most important values which we must rediscover to move beyond the cults of personalities of previous leaders, beyond factionalism and a step closer to a Labour government, to once again serve the country and the people we love.

[Ali Khosravi is a second-year PPE student at Balliol College]