What I Am Reading: "Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain" by John Bew (in conversation with Rachel Megan Barker)

I have been reading “Clement Attlee The Man Who Made Modern Britain” by John Bew. Rather than my own thoughts on the subject, I decided to post a conversation between myself and my good friend, Rachel Megan Barker. Rachel is a Labour Party activist and trade union representative in the UK. She currently sits on the committee of Hendon Labour Party and is co-chair of LGBT Labour London and South East.

Tyler: One thing that is stressed throughout the book is Clement Attlee’s fundamental moderation and pragmatism. He started his political involvement as a middle-class community organizer, and was always wary of utopian schemes (that were much in-evidence in the Labour Party’s early years, as everyone battled to shape the party’s identity). He was smart, but he was more given-over to action than to intellectualism.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s like the foundation of why he was so great. Although I think interestingly, what you describe is very, very true, and very important, but very often gets forgotten now. There’s, I think, a false perception of him as an idealist among many folks.

Also, I think the rise of a whole new party to that level of nationwide success is...wild. There’s no equivalent story in the UK, before or since.

The book spends some time on why Attlee thinks the labor movement has been so successful at that time frame, and he attributes it to:

1: increased government concern for the working class after the Boer War exposed poor health conditions amongst conscripts

2. Vast expansion of the voting franchise

3. WW1's expansion of the idea of citizenship, i.e. “if I can be sent off to die, I should be allowed to vote.”

Yeah, the wars were a huge part of it. And then there was a boost, I would argue, to Labour from the fact that they basically ran the country during WWII. They got to prove themselves.

But also it’s hard to separate the bigger picture stuff from the fact that...they hadn’t tried before. The labour (in this context, you really should spell it with a u) movement hadn’t set up a party before, hadn’t organised in that way before so, I think whilst there was a lot of bigger picture stuff that was on their side, it’s also important that they...did it. They organised and they succeeded.

Also it is incredibly Attlee to be like “well I think we succeeded because of these other things that were out of our control”. He wasn’t the type to be like “well, I did a good job”, but he did.

Well, it didn't exactly go according to plan prior to his term in office. The party had a big setback with the MacDonald betrayal, and Attlee did a lot to build it back up during those years in opposition to the National coalition government. It's interesting because, though Attlee wasn't a big theorist, it was a time period when he and other official engaged in a fair amount of theorizing and philosophizing, because they had to reclaim some sense of identity in light of the fact that their first big leader had just dumped them.

Attlee at that point stressed opposition to charismatic figures, which comes across in his non-pacifist approach to dealing with the threat of Hitler and Mussolini. The book's author spends time connecting strands of Attlee's life to books he had consumed, and he connects that to learning from the Cromwell example, that institutions are more important that charismatic leaders.

Oh of course, but the road being difficult is…not an indication that they didn't do it, or were just blown along by some great force of history; quite the opposite. They could have failed. We might never have had the post war Labour government; that is entirely possible. We had it because they got their shit together and made it happen.

Also, obvs Attlee wasn't into charismatic leaders and that was one of his whole things (I think the presumption that he himself was not one though is kinda limited in its understanding, but we can come to that later) but I think it’s needlessly linking things to say that was his issue with Hitler and Mussolini. His issue with them was the whole fascism thing they were doing.

Yes, also fair. It is interesting to see how that brought him together with Churchill in the years before the war, and how in many ways, some of the right and much of the left were opposed to the appeasement policies of the National government. Subsequently, the Labour party refused to serve under Chamberlain, and Churchill ended up ascending to leadership as a result.

Another reason that the post-war Labour government was able to ascend was that during the war, the party itself showed its competence by serving effectively in government (and not overthrowing it, as radicals wanted at various points). Meanwhile, their ideas were given a test drive, as full war mobilization was an example of the command economy that they were in favor of.

Yep. Something I ways find funny is the Conservatives presumption they would win in 1945 due to the Churchill having led the UK during the war. But who are you gonna elect as a peace time PM? The guy who led the war effort - great, but not exactly relevant now - or the guy that was running the country that whole time?

I think, on another note, what is important and notable about Attlee’s pragmatism was it was rooted in very genuinely caring about people. It could therefore easily encompass the kind of domestic policy which created the NHS with a pro-military and interventionist foreign policy, or state economic investment with real and strident opposition to the rise of Communism; and to not have these just be arbitrary lines drawn in the sand in the name of moderation or pragmatism, but rather be heartfelt beliefs that came out of a fundamentally morally good framework.

If I compare Attlee and Tony Blair, for a moment - and I say this as someone who is a fan of Tony Blair - but whilst in many ways the two are very similar, Blair’s fatal flaw was his ego. At the end of the day, he did want to do good, but became unable to see the difference between what was good for him and what was good for the country and the world.

Attlee had no ego to trip him up in that way.

And I think that's why he gets spoken of as “not a charismatic leader”. But I don't think that's true; because he did lead and he did command authority through force of personality. He was an example of how you can do this in a way that is quiet, and not flashy, and not based in ego. He would, I'm sure, hate to hear himself described as being a charismatic leader, but I think he was one. But it was a charisma born of integrity and a really good heart.

I think that’s a fair assessment. Since you brought up foreign policy, it is interesting that Attlee grasped the strategic importance of nuclear weapons immediately, and endeavored to build up Britain’s deterrence capacity. With the benefit of hindsight, we can view the balance that the Cold War grew into, but I think we forget that American policymakers had a lot of options in 1945, and the British and other Europeans were reasonable to fear a return to the isolationism that plagued the interwar period. Attlee did his best to prevent this.

Additionally, I want to note that it is not all hagiography as far as Attlee is concerned. He did preside over an at-times difficult economic transition, and his foreign policy did not always take the moral high ground. The British government decided that the Arabs and Israelis could essentially sort their own problems out regarding the fate of the Mandate of Palestine, with the British giving up on mediation. As the book says, Attlee and his government brought a lot of energy to the decolonization of India that they did not bring to the Middle East. It returns to the theme that Attlee viewed decolonization as the successful culmination of empire, and not as a rebuke to the evils of imperialism as some of his contemporaries viewed it.

Right. I mean, Attlee was someone who had served in the military during WW1 and I would say understood a lot of the realities that were being faced post WW2.

And no, of course not; there's a pretty big gulf between being a truly good person and being a perfect one, and he was not the latter. Re: specifically colonialism; I think there was a reality in the British mindset of a complete unwillingness and inability to face the reality of the horror we inflicted that perpetuates to this day, and is a problem in terms of our ability to understand and confront a lot of realities around the perpetuation of racism in this country. I see the same sort of thing reflected in the US in an unwillingness to confront the true horrors of slavery in many places.

Many places like Virginia?

In the end, a big theme of the book was Attlee’s belief in continuity - decolonization was the natural endpoint for the British Empire, and fulfillment of some of their high-minded promises. The Labour government of 1945-51 was an application of the previous 50 years of Labour campaign promises, as well as a fulfillment of the “land fit for heroes” that was denied to returning WW1 soldiers. Another strong theme was his idea of the responsibilities of citizenship, especially as they are applied (and perhaps increased) in a socialist state. In fact, the book was published under the title of “Citizen Clem” in the UK. Do you think that this makes sense? Evolution, not revolution?

Yes, like Virginia.

And, oh wait, this book is Citizen Clem?! That’s so funny - I did totally hear about that book but didn’t realise...that was the book we were talking about.

The thing about “not revolution” is I think that...means a different thing in the UK. It’s very much on purposely counterposed to an actual revolutionary tradition that exists here that doesn’t exist in the US. But it becomes a binary here that I don’t think it helpful. No, we shouldn’t be manning the barricades, like, obviously. But most of the hard left traditions here are evolutionary too. Jeremy Corbyn is evolutionary. He’s just a crappy form of that that has neither vision nor understanding of reality.

I guess that’s the more important thing about Attlee. He was interested in people and willing to meet people where they are, and understand the realities which we live, as compared to a lot of more ideological elements of the Labour Party.

Attlee has now become something of a mythological figure in the party; loved by all and claimed by everyone as someone who adheres to “their” tradition, and as a result, I think we get a very watered down version of him in a lot of discourse. He becomes someone who must be everything to everyone in the party; in a way I would hazard a guess he would not like much.