Clement Attlee

Clement Attlee (born January 3, 1883, Putney, London, England—died October 8, 1967, Westminster, London) was a British Labour Party leader (1935–55) and prime minister (1945–51). He presided over the establishment of the welfare state in Great Britain and the granting of independence to India, the most important step in the conversion of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. He was perhaps the leading Labour politician of the 20th century. He transformed his party into the natural opponent of the Conservative Party and thus polarized British politics.

Early life

Clement Attlee was the fourth son of Henry Attlee, a prosperous London solicitor, and Ellen Watson. He was educated at Haileybury College, a boarding school in Hertfordshire with a strong imperial tradition, and the University of Oxford. He was called to the bar in 1905 but abandoned law in 1909.

In 1905 he began regular visits to the impoverished East End of London, where he did volunteer work at a settlement house that was supported by Haileybury College. Two years later he took up residence at the house—a move that decisively influenced his whole political future. The harsh poverty he saw in East London undermined his faith in the existing order. Although he did not undergo a sudden political conversion, his views moved steadily to the left, and he became and remained throughout his life a committed ethical socialist. He joined the Fabian Society in 1907 and the Independent Labour Party in 1908. For the next 15 years, apart from his World War I service (he served in Gallipoli, Iraq, and France), he continued to live in the heart of London’s slums.

In everything except politics, Attlee was profoundly conservative. He liked and respected almost every traditional institution with which he was associated. He was also strongly family oriented, and—unusual among bourgeois socialists of his epoch—he felt no revulsion against his class and background. Moreover, there was almost as little vanity in him as there was iconoclasm. Apart from his well-developed social conscience, he was in every respect a conventional and rather self-effacing English upper-middle-class gentleman.

Political beginnings

Entering East End politics after the war, Attlee became mayor of the borough of Stepney in 1919 and was elected to Parliament from the constituency of Limehouse in 1922. This parliamentary provenance was crucial to his emergence in 1935 as Labour Party leader and as the first Labour prime minister to command a governing majority.

In the House of Commons his progress was steady but not meteoric. He served as undersecretary of state for war in the first Labour government (1924), led by Ramsay MacDonald. In 1927 he was appointed to the Indian Statutory Commission. Joining the Labour government in 1930, he was successively chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster—a sinecure that left him free to give wide-ranging assistance to the prime minister and other senior ministers—and postmaster general.

Following the formation of MacDonald’s “National” coalition government with the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party in 1931, the Labour Party suffered an electoral massacre. Only the 52 most rock-solid working-class constituencies returned Labour members, Limehouse among them. After the election, Attlee repudiated MacDonald and refused, like most Labour ministers, to serve in MacDonald’s 1931–35 administration.

After the general election of 1931, Attlee became deputy party leader under George Lansbury. After Lansbury was forced to resign in 1935 because of his strong pacifism, Attlee succeeded to the leadership. A by-election and the subsequent general election returned several figures to the House of Commons—including Arthur Greenwood and Herbert Morrison—who probably would have been preferred to Attlee had they been members of the previous Parliament. They did not, however, succeed in replacing him as leader.

Under Attlee’s leadership in the late 1930s, the party adopted a moderate domestic policy and supported resistance to fascism and aggression abroad, though it was reluctant to accept rearmament. Attlee gave his full support to the British declaration of war against Germany in 1939, but he was unwilling to join a coalition government under Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In May 1940 it became impossible for Chamberlain to carry on without Labour support, and Attlee’s refusal to provide it was decisive in forcing Chamberlain’s replacement by Winston Churchill. Attlee then entered the war cabinet as lord privy seal; by 1942 he had become deputy prime minister and secretary of state for Dominion affairs. In 1943 he became lord president of the council—though he retained the deputy prime ministership—and he served in this capacity until the end of the war. Only he and Churchill served continuously in the war cabinet throughout the life of the coalition government.

In May 1945 Attlee led his party out of the coalition and achieved a stunning parliamentary majority in the subsequent general election, capturing 393 seats in the House of Commons. He became prime minister in July and held the office until October 1951—longer than any other prime minister since Herbert Asquith (1908–16).

Prime ministership and later years

Attlee’s government was one of the most significant 20th-century peacetime administrations, both because of the quality of its leading ministers and because of the imprint that it left on British politics. Although several of his principal colleagues—notably Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, and Hugh Gaitskell—were more dominant public personalities than Attlee, until nearly the end of his government he held this somewhat turbulent team together with great success. His firm control over discussions in cabinet meetings reflected his experience in the wartime coalition government. It was said that when Churchill presided over such meetings, they were exhilarating but inconclusive, whereas when Attlee presided (which was often, since Churchill was frequently absent), crisp, clear decisions were quickly made.

Although Attlee’s government constantly struggled with a weak balance-of-payments position, which made American loans and Marshall Plan assistance essential in 1945 and 1948, respectively, he continued with a firm program of nationalization, including coal, railways, gas, and electricity. One of the highlights of his administration was its social reforms, including the creation of the National Health Service. Together, these programs shifted the agenda of British politics in a moderate-left direction for a generation. Three successive Conservative governments accepted a broad consensus in favour of a mixed economy, extensive government-funded social services, and the pursuit of full employment; these priorities were not significantly changed until the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Although occasionally expressing doubt about the extent of British military commitments overseas, Attlee firmly supported the view of his foreign secretary, Bevin, that facing the Soviet threat required building up the military strength of the West and maintaining the commitment of the United States to the defense of western Europe. Attlee’s government was a key architect of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of 1949. In 1950 he readily accepted the need for Allied entry in the Korean War and for a new rearmament program. Additionally, Attlee oversaw the beginning of the dismantling of the British Empire, granting independence to India in 1947.

In the general election of February 1950, Attlee’s parliamentary majority was reduced to six, and his government was further weakened in April 1951 by the resignations of Bevan and Harold Wilson over the introduction of health-service charges. In the autumn of 1951 Attlee decided to ask for a dissolution of Parliament, which resulted in a narrow Conservative victory and Attlee’s resignation from the prime ministership. He remained leader of the opposition until December 1955, endeavouring to preserve the unity of his party throughout the difficult days of the “Bevanite” quarrel. The feud was more personal than ideological, for the policy differences between the leaders of the two factions—Gaitskell and Bevan—were surprisingly narrow, much more so than those between Tony Benn and Denis Healey in the 1980s. But their temperaments were very different, and Bevan felt that he had been unfairly passed over for the positions of chancellor and foreign secretary in 1950–51. This may indeed have been Attlee’s major failure in political management.

After Labour’s defeat in the 1955 election, Attlee resigned as party leader and was subsequently created an earl and elevated to the House of Lords, where he remained politically active until his death in 1967. He was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1951 and a Knight of the Garter in 1956. Attlee was one of only four British prime ministers—Arthur James Balfour, Churchill, and Thatcher were the others—to receive both of these high honours. His memoirs, As It Happened (1954), are distinguished more for their laconic discretion than their revelatory interest.