Citizen clem john bew

"I shall die with lots of poetry in my heart and perhaps on my lips." [p545]

“He was one of the last prominent Victorians in public life to pass away” [p543]

Attlee, born in 1883 to an affluent family, was educated at a minor public (meaning private, fee paying) school, then Cambridge University, before qualifying to practice law and with a financial legacy to sustain him. His family shared strong commitments to public service and raised no objections when Attlee soon switched from a legal career to social work in Limehouse, an impoverished district in East London, where direct personal contact exploded misconceptions about the nature of poverty and instilled a deep admiration for the hard work and social cohesion that made working class life (marginally) possible in the face of intolerable burdens and unfair odds. Attlee soon extended his interest to politics and the account of the formation of the Labour Party and the disparate groups it brought together over several decades is interesting, albeit sketchy. In this way he established the political values which remained central to the rest of his life, founded on practical experience rather than political theory; indeed, he never did master economics as such and his socialism was never based on Marxism, but on local politics and trade-unionism.

Attlee served with distinction as a volunteer soldier in the First World War. He only just survived the Gallipoli campaign and emerged with the odd conviction that Churchill was strategically correct in planning this assault, blaming the generals for poor implementation; Bew never points out that this places Attlee in a very small minority, or ever dwells on the evidence that the campaign was a disaster and its location inherently ill conceived, but this did have great significance later when Attlee supported Churchill in the Second World War. Attlee also served in front line positions in Iraq – being wounded in another ill conceived campaign - and in France – fortunately to see victory - and was very lucky to survive. It is impossible to neglect these extraordinary experiences when considering his personality.

Attlee formed the conviction that the people of Britain fought this war as citizens regardless of social class and were entitled to feel betrayed when they returned home to slum housing and endemic unemployment. He served the growing Labour Party in local and national politics, before unexpectedly being called on to lead the tiny group of Labour MPs surviving in Parliament after the great betrayal by which Ramsay Macdonald formed a so called National Government and secured an overwhelming parliamentary majority from which to try and fail to lead Britain out of the Great Depression. It was the Conservatives who were able to form the next government, but Attlee’s Labour had restored its fortunes sufficiently to secure a role as full partners in Churchill’s wartime coalition from 1940, with Atlee as effectively deputy PM.

Labour’s role in the wartime coalition – and not least their contribution to creating and administering an effective wartime economy – reflected the presence around Attlee of a number of very strong Labour politicians, notably Ernest Bevin, and this provided the necessary platform from which the 1945 Labour Government was given the mandate to restore a peacetime economy that was centrally planned and designed above all to secure full employment and the basis of a welfare state, largely as prescribed by Beveridge. Attlee had worked from the outset to ensure that Britain had clear and ambitious war aims and in the five years after 1945 he was able to deliver everything he had promised and all, indeed that he had aspired to from his early days as a social worker in East London. Any attempt to present Attlee as anything other than a socialist and a radical is just wrong.

Attlee also formed the view that international affairs must be transformed. He was instrumental in securing the founding of the United Nations, the introduction of concepts of international law prevailing over national interests, and replacing the British Empire with a Commonwealth of independent, democratic nation states sharing at least some core values. Securing independence for India and Pakistan was probably his major achievement, withdrawal from Palestine while handing over key decisions to the United Nations was possibly the least worst outcome available to him there in the face of US intransigence. He worked hard to ensure that the United States accepted international responsibilities and did not revert to isolationism, but he also worked without scruple to secure an independent atom bomb for Britain, having formed the view that without such a deterrent Britain could be easily and without ceremony wiped out. He accepted as inevitable that Britain must contribute to the Korean War when it broke out, though he was critical of American behaviour in that war and was annoyed by American intransigence over recognising China’s communist regime once it had clearly assumed full control. America’s hatred of communism was capable of leading to irrational and dangerous policies.

Britain ended the Second World War effectively bankrupt. Attlee’s Labour government was forced to rely on borrowing from the USA to survive economically, on terms which were extremely onerous and arguably harmful to Britain’s long term interests. External commitments, including those to Germany’s ruined economy, drained resources that could be ill afforded; India’s independence deprived Britain of soldiers who had previously played a crucial role around the globe; the Korean War was another unwelcome and unaffordable demand which could only be met through fresh austerity at home. In any case, a bankrupt Britain could only purchase the food and raw materials it required so long as it earned a sufficient income through exported manufactured goods, and that forced the Labour Government to continue to restrain wages and consumer spending. Despite these constraints, it was still possible to nationalise key infrastructure, to deliver full employment, to institute a range of welfare supports, to invest in education, to build new homes of good quality and in huge numbers, and to announce in 1948 the successful launch of a National Health Service.

“Attlee had now led the party into five general elections over twenty years. The first, in 1935, had seen it recover from near annihilation four years earlier; the results in 1945 and 1950 were the best in its history and, even in 1951, despite losing power, Labour had won the largest share of the vote.”[p530] This is an electoral record that any modern politician, certainly any Labour leader, would want to understand and emulate. Even at its best, however, about a third of working class voters were voting Conservative, while middle class voters and others could always be attracted to the Conservatives by the prospect of enjoying their advantages. The impression is that Labour lost power when enough voters grew tired of austerity and saw an opportunity for greater personal reward, regardless of any abstract greater good. It is less complicated to say the Tories won by appealing to greed.

Throughout this book there is a theme to the effect that what Attlee did for Labour was to appeal to a middle class vote that was not attracted to socialist policies. This is where the book becomes less about Attlee and more about contemporary political debate, circa 2016. Not enough people appreciate Attlee’s historical achievements and this book does a great job to remedy that failing and set out a clear account of his career. But if it is not clear enough while reading the main text, with its recurring jibes about the failings of the Left in the Labour movement, then the epilogue makes it more clear and the new preface, added in 2017 to comment on the campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader, places it beyond doubt. This book about the past is written to influence today’s debates about the future of Labour in Britain.

In a telling phrase, Bew writes; “As the ‘old left’ faded in the late 1950s,... there was a complete rejection of the tradition of moderate, reformist, democratic socialism which Attlee had come to embody.” [p599] He refers on the same page to “the type of left-wing intellectuals who sneered at the simplistic patriotism of men like Attlee.” Bew seems to be erecting a sort of golden age in the past when Labour had better leadership than the modern crew of pretenders, as if we could bring back Clem Attlee in all his unique complexity and invite him to resume control of affairs. This is neither rational nor helpful.

The past has a rock-solid facticity that is immutable. It is not just that we cannot change the past, but that the past is constituted from a vast series of singular events each of which might have been otherwise. The fact that Attlee acted one way and achieved a given outcome does not demonstrate the merit of trying to repeat the same trick in different – or even in similar circumstances. It also does not demonstrate that a different course of action might not have been better. The fact that Attlee’s leadership was beneficial in the way it was is interesting – it is a statement about what did happen – but it does not demonstrate the implications of an alternative. I am prepared to accept that I do not know if a different course of action might have been better but I am not prepared to simply grant that Attlee (or Bew writing about Attlee) was invariably correct, or that his critics were certainly wrong.

There were lots of occasions when Attlee was simply lucky and might not be so lucky again. If we must argue that he made his own luck, which is not a logical proposition as it happens (for many things it is nonsense), then we are at least entitled to suggest that he made his own bad luck too. Take for example his apparent failure to develop a new generation of leaders to succeed himself and his trusted associates, or the extent to which at the end of his administration he seemed to have run out of steam. Was he really surrounded by lesser mortals or was he actually limiting their room to grow?

If Bew tries to make Attlee into a fetish, he also tries to make too many others into clowns. To take a single instance, he acknowledges at one point that Aneurin Bevan had successfully brought the NHS into being, a monumental administrative achievement, while Attlee had no administrative achievement to his credit, comparable or otherwise. With this example in mind, and only for the sake of an example, it is one thing to emphasise that Bevan was an utterly different type of political animal to Attlee, quite another thing to insist that Attlee was wise while Bevan was foolish to the point of being a political child. It is all very well to complain that Bevan lacked the gravitas and seriousness that Attlee brought to the task of leading, but he also lacked the appalling social failings and the deplorable communication skills that made Attlee such a surprising choice. The only thing that we can learn from this is that every person specification for a political leader is nonsensical; if Attlee could lead successfully despite lacking the requirements of a leader, why not Bevan?

Bew refers to the Left in Labour as “sectarian” as though their opponents were something other than sectarian. He deplores fragmentation in the Labour Party as though somehow politics was a great career choice for people with mild manners and moderate emotions, or Conservatives were a model of team play. He makes great play of Attlee’s lack of Marxist inclinations while conceding that his failure to investigate economics was a significant weakness in a prime minister leading a programme of national economic planning.

This reasoning just does not work to my mind. I learned a lot about Attlee and for this I am grateful to Bew, but I decline to draw the implications that Bew does from what I have learned. Look it’s just annoying to see history manipulated to serve sectarian interests. The discussion of Left and Right in Labour history is certainly interesting but should be played out in the open with a proper account of the issues and the competing strands. This excellent history of Attlee’s career is certainly useful background for such a discussion but I cannot evaluate Attlee without a fair and balanced examination of the people around him.