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Clem Attlee Labour’s
Great Reformer
Francis Beckett
London:
Haus Publishing, 2015 Paperback.
xxi+490 p. ISBN 978-1910376058. £11
Reviewed
by Laura Beers University of Birmingham
This is not a book intended
for an academic reader, nor does it deserve to be read by one. Historians
looking for a comprehensive scholarly biography of Attlee are still best served
by Kenneth Harris’s authorised history, first published in 1980. Since its
publication, Attlee, arguably Labour’s greatest prime minister, has been graced
by numerous studies, including Trevor Burridge’s Clement Attlee : A Political Biography (1985), Nicklaus
Thomas-Symonds’ skeptical assessment of the Labour leader, Attlee : A
Life in Politics (2010), and
Michael Jago’s recent Clement Attlee : The Inevitable Prime Minister
(2014), as well as several more niche studies, such as Jonathan Swift’s Labour in Crisis : Clement Attlee
and the Labour Party in Opposition, 1931-1940, and Robert Crowcroft’s Attlee’s War : World War II and the
Making of a Labour Leader (2011). Attlee also formed the subject of
an earlier biography by Beckett, published by Methuen in 2007, which forms the
basis for this updated and expanded study. This
new book is significantly longer than Beckett’s 2007 effort, and includes
previously unpublished archival material on the Romanian-born Limehouse political
operative/fixer Oscar Tobin who helped get Attlee his start in politics and
whom Attlee helped to arrange his naturalisation, and slightly more information
about the author’s father John Beckett, who worked as Attlee’s first agent in
Limehouse. (There is, however, notably little on Beckett’s shift from supporting
Labour to supporting Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, nor is there
much on the emergence and appeal of the BUF, despite Beckett’s unique
opportunity to glean an understanding of the movement from his father.) It also
includes references to some recent literature, albeit exclusively books
intended for a broader trade audience, including David Kynaston’s Austerity
Britain 1945-51 (2010) and Peter Hennessy’s Never Again : Britain
1945-51 (2006). Yet, the core of the book remains unchanged. The author’s
principal argument is that Attlee was a skilled politician and tactician; that
his rise to power was the result of that skill and not a result of the
historical “accident” of his being one of the few junior ministers from the
1929-31 government to retain his parliamentary seat following the 1931 general
election debacle; that his politics were more consistently radical than his
left-wing detractors have appreciated; and that he was personally much more
warm-hearted and witty than the public perception of him as a taciturn enigma
suggests. Personally,
I like Attlee, and am inclined to endorse a positive reading of his political
strengths. However, there were times when Beckett’s biography seemed to verge
over into the hagiographic. For example, Beckett’s discussion of why Attlee
supported Ramsay MacDonald’s timid legislative programme during the 1929-31
Labour government does not address the nuance of interwar political economy, or
take seriously the deep ambivalence of many within the Labour movement about
the politics of the possible in a situation of minority government. Instead,
MacDonald is painted unproblematically as a vainglorious villain – a “cruel
fraud” [103] – and Attlee is excused for supporting him on the flimsy pretext
that, while “he must in his heart have agreed with the ILP [left-wing opponents
of the administration]”, he had “decided that rebellion was not going to
achieve anything”, and hence decided not to rock the boat [133, 136]. On the
question of Attlee’s commitment to living a middle-class lifestyle, including
providing his children with a private education, he has even less to say. The
most illuminating moment on this subject is when he quotes Attlee’s response to
a question from his daughter as to why he sent her and her siblings to private
schools if he believed in state education: “The man who lives in the world as
though the world is the way he hopes it is going to be is a crank” [159]. While
it is hard not to wish at times that Beckett had trained a more critical eye on
his subject, this is not the reason that students and scholars should steer
clear of this book. Rather, it is riddled with factual errors of the kind that
should not be allowed into even the most loosely edited trade history. Most
egregiously, Beckett writes that, following the 1926 general strike, the prime
minister Stanley Baldwin, “agreed to ditch a bill which would have severely
damaged the Labour Party’s income, sounding as though he were being gracious to
a defeated enemy. The bill, which had wide Conservative support, would have
required trade union members to ‘opt in’ to paying the political levy instead
of ‘opting out’ as formerly” [122]. The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act was
in fact passed by the Baldwin government in 1927, and the clause requiring
union members to opt in to the political levy cost the party approximately
one-third of its subscription income. The act was fiercely resented by the
Labour party – its
repeal was one of the first acts of the Attlee government (one which,
unsurprisingly, is not mentioned in this book). Other errors include the
assertion that “Labour’s 1936 conference in Edinburgh condemned
non-intervention [in the Spanish Civil War] and demanded that the British
government restore to the Spanish government its right to bear arms” [192]. Actually,
this did not happen. While several Labour MPs, including Ellen Wilkinson,
Philip Noel-Baker and Leah Manning, spoke passionately in favour of the Spanish
Republic, the party executive refused to take action in 1936, for fear of a
backlash from Catholic trade unionists, and the conference only called for an
end to non-intervention in 1937. Attlee ultimately became a vocal supporter of
the Republic, and the international brigade christened the Major Attlee Company
in his honour. However, he did not initially take a firm lead on Spain. Lord
Beaverbrook, the architect of “imperial preference”, or the scheme to create a
tariff barrier around the empire, is described as “the most strident and
dogmatic free marketer of his time” [230]. Ellen Wilkinson is described as
having abandoned her leftwing politics out of “distres[s] at being excluded
from MacDonald’s government in 1929” [182]. In fact, she trimmed her political
wings between 1929 and 1931 precisely because she was in government, as Susan
Lawrence’s PPS at the ministry of health. These and other errors significantly
detract from what would otherwise be an entertaining and informative, if at
times excessively upbeat, biography.
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