Clement Attlee

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Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and leader of the British Labour Party from 1935 to 1955.

Early career[edit]

Attlee was born in Putney into a middle-class family. He was educated at Haileybury and University College, Oxford before training as a lawyer. He turned to socialism after working with slum children in the East End of London. Good works for the poor did not attract him; he did not want there to be any poor. He left the Fabian Society and joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908. Attlee became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1913, but enlisted promptly for the First World War. Having reached the rank of Major, and been seriously wounded, he became Mayor of the London borough of Stepney in 1919 and a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for the Limehouse division of Stepney in 1922. He was James Ramsay MacDonald's Parliamentary Private Secretary during the brief 1922 Parliament.

Attlee served in the first two Labour governments, as Under-Secretary of State for War in 1924 with Ramsay MacDonald, then as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and later Postmaster General in the 1929 to 1931 MacDonald government. He actively supported the General Strike in 1926. In 1928 he reluctantly joined the Simon Commission, a royal commission on the British Raj in India. As a result of the time he had to devote to this, he was not initially offered a ministerial post in the Second Labour Government. In 1930, Labour MP Oswald Mosley attacked his own government favouring Keynesian action against unemployment, and lost. Attlee got Mosley's old job as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was Postmaster General in 1931, when most of the party's leaders lost their seats; this helped him win the deputy leadership under George Lansbury. Attlee, and Labour, opposed appeasement. He became leader in 1935, and remained until 1955.

Second World War[edit]

In May 1940, Attlee joined the coalition government under Winston Churchill's leadership as a member of the war cabinet. Initially appointed Lord Privy Seal, Attlee was Churchill's deputy in both committee and Parliament. His main wartime responsibility was governance of civil matters (in effect, operating as a peacetime Prime Minister). Churchill and Attlee were the only ministers who remained in the war cabinet throughout the conflict. Attlee was officially appointed Deputy Prime Minister in 1942 and he also held the posts of Dominions Secretary, from 1942 to 1943, and Lord President of the Council, from 1943 to 1945.

Prime minister[edit]

Labour was returned to power after a "landslide" General Election victory in July 1945. Attlee became Prime Minister with the clear aim of reforming the country with measures including the nationalisation of public utilities and the creation of the modern welfare state. India became independent, and Britain's role in Palestine ended. Attlee's Health Secretary Nye Bevan, was at the forefront of creating the National Health Service. The substantial enactment of its manifesto commitments earned Attlee's government a contemporary level of esteem matched by few previous or later administrations, and Attlee is widely regarded as Britain's greatest Prime Minister.

The Labour Party was returned to power in the 1950 General Election but with a much-reduced majority, although that was mostly due to the Conservative opposition recovering support at the expense of the Liberal Party. Labour lost the 1951 General Election of 1951 after being weakened by splits exacerbated by the strain of financing British involvement in the Korean War. Attlee led the party in opposition until 1955, when he retired from the House of Commons. He became Earl Attlee and became a member of the House of Lords until his death in 1967.

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