Well, my ignorance concerning Prime Ministers of Britain is 'yuuuuuuuge', as regular readers will testify! After all, I have only just in the last few weeks discovered what an unprincipled, lying, duplicitous, Welsh shit, the late, unlamented David Lloyd George, was as PM. Thus, I am less than shocked to find out that the late Clem Attlee was not much better.
Of course, the main chance he had for everlasting fame was as deputy Prime Minister under the enormous shadow of Winston Churchill during WWII. No chance there, of course, with that massive ego towering over everything and everyone. Still, he had a sort of second chance when, against all the odds, he beat Churchill in the election at the end of of the war. Unfortunately - for him but not for us! - he took command of a country that was wrecked almost beyond repair. Of course, he nationalised just about everything he could lay his socialist hands on but really that amounted to a mere extension of wartime 'rules 'n' regs'. None of them worked that well and over the next 50+ years his socialism was sold back to private enterprise. Even his 'goody-goody' left-wing credentials do not stand up to scrutiny, according to 'The Speccie' which points out':
Today the twitter mob likes to condemn Churchill for the darker episodes of the war, like the handling of the Bengal Famine in 1943 and the strategic bombing of German cities. But Attlee, as Deputy Prime Minister from 1942, was fully involved in those policies and raised no objections. Indeed, it was Attlee, in Churchill’s absence, who gave the order for the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which killed 25,000 civilians. Nor was he then a firm supporter of Indian self-rule, which he feared could lead to 'a brown oligarchy'. One Labour peer, Lord Listowel, complained that on India, Attlee was 'a muted echo of his master’s voice'. Modern ideologues might also be interested to know that in 1944 Attlee fully backed Churchill in overturning an attempt by parliament to give equal pay to women teachers.
Nationalisation of some industries apart, his home policies were not exactly true red, international/socialist:
After the war, Attlee was no social justice warrior. In fact, he was the iciest of Cold War warriors. Without consulting either the cabinet or the Commons, he decided that Britain should have its own independent nuclear arsenal. A key architect of Nato, he approved of clandestine operations to undermine eastern European communism like an attempted coup in Albania. At home, he used 12,000 troops to smash a communist-backed dock strike in 1949. Fascinated by intelligence – he met the director general of MI5 more than any other post-war prime minister – he introduced anti-subversive security vetting for senior civil servants and also instructed that MPs, ministers and even their families be monitored for signs of disloyalty.
I'm not complaining, mind, in fact I am deeply grateful that his upper-middle-class background, plus perhaps, some ingrained common-sense kept him away from the wilder yearnings of his, er, 'Brethren'! Imagine what Michael Foot or Jeremy Corbyn might have done!
Yeah, Attlee was just the sort of bossy boots who's right up your strasse, eh, Gaffer!
The bottom pointy corner of Nolan's chart is where national socialists and class socialists are so squeezed together they become indistinguishable.
No "social distancing" down there!
SoD
Posted by: Loz | Monday, 22 June 2020 at 08:06