Methuen Politicos (£20)
During the late 1950s and 1960s, political discussions of the Attlee era tended to be highly critical. For the right, Attlee identified Labour too closely with obsolete shibboleths like nationalisation and the cloth cap; for the left, his government represented a spectacular failure to capture the commanding heights of the economy. In the light of the defeat and disillusionment that afflicted the Labour party during the Wilson years in the 1970s, however, perceptions of the 1945 Government were transformed; and that has remained the case ever since. Today, the Attlee era is seen as Labour's golden age. As David Marquand argued in his recent work on Britain after 1918, the Attlee years were about forging the democratic collectivist vision of a new society, "which still accounts for its legendary status in Labour memories."
Unquestionably, Attlee's government offers an object lesson in how to survive tough political and economic times, and has substantive achievements to its credit—not least full employment, and the creation of the welfare state and the National Health Service "in a land fit for heroes." Sam Watson, leader of the Durham Miners declared in 1950: "Poverty has been abolished. Hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folks are cherished; our children are growing up in a land of opportunity". But should the Attlee administration really set the standard against which the Labour party will eternally be judged? Regrettably, Watson's eulogy only tells half the story. There were misjudgements too, and a succession of missed opportunities. With the influence of that period of political history still strong, then, a subtle re-assessment of Attlee is both justified and urgent; and Giles Radice's new book could not be more timely.
Radice's fascinating study of Attlee and the gifted lieutenants who surrounded him in Cabinet—Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison—is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the innate caution and "small c" conservatism that at times bedevilled Labour as a party of government. Radice insists that despite being one of the least charismatic Prime Ministers of recent times, Attlee's premiership was one of great achievement as he harnessed the energies of his more dynamic Ministers to provide ideas, inspiration, and drive. Labour's Cabinet "was one of mutual need," but when the health of key figures such as Bevin and Cripps gave out in the late 1940s, the government faltered and, after defeat in 1951, Labour remained out of office for thirteen years.
Radice acknowledges that the responsibility, in truth, ought to be laid squarely at Attlee's door. Necessarily, "the tortoise and the hares" were of their time, possessing a deeply conservative attitude towards political institutions and Britain's world role. The prime minister was strongly attached to the British monarchy and personally close to King George VI, whom he held in high esteem. There was little appetite among Attlee's "hares" for constitutional reforms that might have reinvigorated British democracy, or for a fundamental reconstruction of the British state.
At heart, they were also "high-minded imperialists." Britain was to have a continuing role as a great power with her own nuclear deterrent and a foreign policy that was independent from both the United States and Soviet Russia. In an early Cabinet paper, Bevin argued that Britain was the only alternative, "to the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia." But this forced Attlee's Cabinet to maintain defence commitments that severely hindered the British economy's recovery from the ravages of war.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1945 victory, Labour might have established a new electoral dominance in British politics, but within five years the chance had been duly squandered. There was no sustained period of power equivalent to that enjoyed by the Social Democrats in Sweden. By 1950, the government had lost its capacity for creative thinking having implemented its manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, with little distinctive or new to say. The leadership sought to consolidate the extension of public ownership by showing that the new state industries could function effectively, instead of forging a fresh synthesis for a changing world. Labour's defeat in 1951 seemed, with hindsight, almost inevitable.
The lesson for Gordon Brown, who (like his predecessor) is known to value Attlee as a model of Labour leadership, is obvious enough: parties that lose their governing élan while lacking a compelling agenda for the future face almost certain defeat. There are few prizes for standing still. And Labour badly needs a compelling theme for a prospective fourth term, whether it is the promise of a genuinely radical meritocracy driven by greater social mobility, or far-reaching changes to the British constitutional settlement encapsulated by a Bill of Rights and a reformed House of Lords. The promise merely to embed past reforms, as Attlee and Morrison demonstrated in 1950-51, makes defeat all but certain next time around. Now is the moment not to bury Attlee's memory, but to end half a century of undue reverence.
