Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.The country defined itself against the crass popularism and extreme mood swings that had led its European neighbours to disaster. The very persona of Attlee – his service in two wars, as a volunteer solider in the First World War, and as deputy to Churchill in wartime coalition – was a guarantee that the “New Jerusalem” was “not something exotic”, as Attlee put it, “but a natural evolution of the British desire for freedom”. Forget the loss of more than a hundred seats – this was progress!įor the modernisers, Attlee’s success tells a different story: a victory dependent on its appeal to Middle England, which kept the “silly left” in its box, or on the back benches. When Attlee’s majority was reduced to five seats in February 1950, despite Labour having won an even higher portion of the popular vote than in 1945, Richard Crossman consoled himself that 13 million people had voted for pure socialism. Such comforting myths, recently recycled by Owen Jones, Billy Bragg and Clare Short, are not new. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters see in Attlee both the victorious outsider and the embodiment of Ken Loach’s “spirit of ’45” – the moment when the British public showed it had just been waiting for a truly socialist agenda. God means different things to different people, however. These days, associating oneself with Attlee has become the equivalent of evoking God in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. How distant such success seems to today’s party.
It is 70 years since Clement Attlee formed his landmark Labour government after winning a 146-seat majority in July 1945.
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