Nick Thomas Symonds MP
Shadow Minister without PortfolioIn this article, Nick Thomas-Symonds, author of Attlee: A Life in Politics, discusses the achievements of Clement Atlee after his historic Labour landslide of 1945.
On 27 July 1945, his first full day as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee found time to send a telegram to his son Martin, then serving as a midshipman on the SS Menelaus in Nova Scotia: “Everything going very well. Family send love.” As ever, Attlee, a man of few words, had described the moment with delightful understatement. The votes cast in the General Election, counted the previous day, had been remarkable. Labour had won 393 seats, securing an overall majority of 146.
The Labour Party Manifesto, Let Us Face The Future, promised that “Victory in war must be followed by a prosperous peace.” It was a time in history when Labour captured the mood of the country to build a better Britain for the post-war world. Today, we can take inspiration from that. As Keir Starmer puts it in his Foreword to the revised edition of my book, Attlee: A Life in Politics, “As Attlee showed in 1945, at times like this, the Labour Party does not look back; it looks only to the future. Our task – and our duty – is to build a better Britain with a government on the side of the people, working in partnership with trade unions and businesses.”
Delivery
Indeed, a central lesson of Attlee’s Governments is that they delivered for people: from the welfare state to the National Health Service, to town planning and housebuilding, the improvements were transformational. The economic model of public ownership and high employment dominated British politics in the decades ahead. Attlee had not only changed people’s lives in the short term, but he had ushered in a whole period in British politics when the Conservatives had to accept Labour’s reforms and work with them. Of the Attlee Governments’ nationalisations, only iron and steel, and road haulage, were reversed in the 1950s. The post-war consensus, as it became known by historians, lasted from 1945 to 1979, until the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, who introduced privatisation, attacked the trade unions and allowed unemployment to rise.
In foreign policy, decolonisation included independence for India: Attlee’s personal role was crucial, both in changing the Viceroy – from Archibald Wavell to Earl Mountbatten – and in setting a date for British withdrawal. Attlee also took the decision for Britain to develop its own independent nuclear deterrent after President Harry S. Truman signed the McMahon Act on 1 August 1946. This had placed control of nuclear weapons development under the United States Atomic Energy Commission and prevented the sharing of information with other countries. Attlee acted quickly, though the decision was taken in secret by a small Cabinet sub-committee. On 25 October 1946, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said the bomb had to have a “bloody Union Jack” on top of it. Attlee was conscious of the enormity of this, and the dangers of nuclear proliferation, when he made an oblique reference to it at the 1948 Party Conference: “It has been said that one of the greatest dangers of civilization today is that man’s conquests in the realms of science have outstripped his moral progress.” The following year, the Attlee Government laid the foundation for Britain’s post-war security with the creation of NATO. Today, over seventy years later, new countries are still joining NATO as Vladimir Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine once again shows its ongoing, central role in world security.
Splits
With such monumental achievements it is, however, reasonable to ask why Attlee was out of office after just over six years as Prime Minister. Firstly, the General Election of February 1950 was ill-timed. Herbert Morrison had opposed it on the grounds that winter weather would disproportionately harm turnout amongst Labour voters. The Chancellor, Stafford Cripps, however, was refusing to construct a budget prior to a General Election. Labour’s majority fell to only five, making parliamentary business very difficult to manage. In this tense situation, much was made of the Labour split in 1951 when Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, and John Freeman resigned from the Government. This was a dispute ostensibly over the imposition of charges for teeth and spectacles on the NHS, but it was also about the cost of the rearmament programme that was putting such strain on the Government’s budget. Bevan clashed directly with the new Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell. For all this, though, the subsequent October 1951 poll yielded the highest number of votes Labour has – to date – secured in a general election – over 13.9 million. The problem was how they were distributed. Labour won more votes than the Conservatives but secured fewer seats. Crucially, the Liberals ran only 109 candidates, unable to afford to run the 475 they had managed in 1950. Attlee’s own view was that, in the absence of a Liberal candidate, their voters would break three-to-two in favour of the Conservatives. None of this, however, masked the reality of the defeat.
Since Attlee left Downing Street, only two Labour leaders have won general elections. For those of us working every day to make Keir Starmer the third, we can still look to 1945-51 for inspiration. When Attlee published his autobiography in 1954, As It Happened, he wrote to his brother Tom to say, with characteristic modesty, that it was “not very good”. We can safely say that Clement Attlee is not remembered for his memoir, but he will always be remembered for what he achieved.