Clement Attlee - Legacy

Legacy

"A modest man, but then he has so much to be modest about", is a quote about Attlee that is very commonly ascribed to Churchill (although Churchill in fact denied saying it, and respected Attlee's service in the War Cabinet). Attlee's modesty and quiet manner hid a great deal that has only come to light with historical reappraisal. In terms of the machinery of government, he was one of the most businesslike and effective of all the British prime ministers. Indeed he is widely praised by his successors, both Labour and Conservative.

His leadership style of consensual government, acting as a chairman rather than a president, won him much praise from historians and politicians alike. Christopher Soames, Britain's Ambassador to France during the government of Edward Heath and cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, remarked that "Mrs. Thatcher was not really running a team. Every time you have a Prime Minister who wants to make all the decisions, it mainly leads to bad results. Attlee didn't. That's why he was so damn good." Even Thatcher herself wrote in her 1995 memoirs, which charted her beginnings in Grantham to her victory in the 1979 General Election, that she admired Attlee, writing: "Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show".

Attlee's administration presided over the successful transition from a wartime economy to peacetime, tackling problems of demobilisation, shortages of foreign currency, and adverse deficits in trade balances and government expenditure. Further domestic policies that he brought about included the establishment of the National Health Service and post-war Welfare State, which became key to the reconstruction of post-war Britain. Attlee and his ministers did much to transform Britain into a more prosperous and egalitarian society during their time in office with reductions in poverty and a rise in the general economic security of the population.

In foreign affairs, he did much to assist with the post-war economic recovery of Europe. He proved a loyal ally of America at the onset of the cold war. Because of his style of leadership it was not he but Ernest Bevin who masterminded foreign policy. It was Attlee's government that decided Britain should have an independent atomic weapons programme, and work began on it in 1947. Bevin, Attlee's Foreign Secretary, famously stated that "We've got to have it and it's got to have a bloody Union Jack on it." However, the first operational British A Bomb was not detonated until October 1952, about one year after Attlee had left office.

Though a socialist, Attlee still believed in the British Empire of his youth. He thought of it as an institution that was a power for good in the world. Nevertheless, he saw that a large part of it needed to be self-governing. Using the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as a model, he began the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth.

His greatest achievement, surpassing many of these, was, perhaps, the establishment of a political and economic consensus about the governance of Britain that all parties, whether Labour, Conservative or Liberal subscribed to for three decades, fixing the arena of political discourse until the later 1970s.

Several years after his death, a street on a new housing development in Tividale, West Midlands, was named Attlee Close in his memory.

On 30 November 1988, a bronze statue of Clement Attlee was unveiled by Harold Wilson (the next Labour prime minister after Attlee) outside Limehouse Library in his former constituency. By then Wilson was the last surviving member of Attlee's cabinet and the unveiling of the statue would be the last public appearance by Wilson, who was by then in the first stages of Alzheimer's Disease and who died in May 1995 after a decade of ill health. In April 2011, Limehouse Library having closed in 2003, the Attlee statue was unveiled in its new home at Queen Mary University of London. Attlee was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of Queen Mary College on 15 December 1948. A blue plaque unveiled in 1979 commemorates Attlee at 17 Monkhams Avenue, in Woodford Green in the London borough of Redbridge.