Re-thinking Clement Attlee

Was Clement Attlee a great Prime Minister? Or was he a bungling idiot?

This feels like an interesting question right now, because the two issues that define Attlee’s legacy are very similar to the issues that President Obama is grappling with – withdrawing from occupied countries and providing health care to the less fortunate.

As an Indian, my first instinct is that Clement Attlee was a bungling idiot. He was responsible for the British withdrawal from India in 1947. However one looks at it, the way the British withdrawal from India was managed, and the consequent partition of India, was an unmitigated disaster (as was Attlee's withdrawal from the British mandate of Palestine). What kind of a fool would chose to dismantle an edifice that had been built up over more than three hundred years - Emperor Jehangir's firman to allow the East India Company to set up a factory in Surat was issued in 1615 - in nine months? The kind of fool who had never before held any substantial responsibility. His Labour party had never been in government before. His sheer ignorance would have given him courage.

However, that is not how the British see Attlee. Surveys generally show that Atlee is one of the best loved British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. This BBC survey shows Attlee, Churchill’s “modest man with much to be modest about”, at #3 out of 19 behind Churchill and Lloyd George. A more recent Newsnight poll in 2008 ranked Attlee at #2 behind Churchill among 12 post war PMs. His most beloved achievement? The NHS.

When I first read about this, I thought there was a pattern here. The NHS, a comprehensive medical system which is totally free at the point of use, entirely funded and managed by the state, is an astonishing enterprise. It is staggeringly vast and impossibly complex. By rights, it should collapse under its own weight. But, miraculously, it works. Okay, not perfectly, but certainly adequately. Maybe it took a beginner’s mind to even imagine that something as ambitious as the NHS could be created. Lack of experience fooled Attlee and his government of beginners into thinking he could just walk away from India without all hell breaking loose. The same lack of experience told him that it was possible to create something as ambitious as the NHS. The beginner’s mind comes with both risks and possibilities.

It turns out I was being too kind to Attlee. Neither he, nor his health minister Aneurin Bevan, dreamt up the NHS with the innocence of a beginner’s mind, and then willed it into existence. Nobody did. The NHS just happened.

This outstanding article by Atul Gawande talks about how. The entire health infrastructure that existed in Britain had been bombed down to rubble through WWII. Yet millions of injured servicemen, and displaced urbanites, evacuated by the government into the countryside, needed to be looked after. There was nobody to do the looking after except the government. By the time the war ended, the only health services that existed in Britain were delivered through this vast nationalized system that nobody would have dreamt possible, or maybe even wanted, if it didn’t already exist. Attlee and Bevan “creating the NHS” was nothing more than legislating to keep the status quo.

What Attlee’s legacy in India and Palestine demonstrate is that the consequences of incompetence are as grave as the consequences of evil. Attlee meant well, and had long supported the Indian freedom struggle. He did not intend to leave millions dead in the wake of British withdrawal and partition. Nor did he want the hurried British withdrawal from Palestine to destabilize the Middle East for generations. Yet, intended or not, the consequences of his actions were as horrible as those of other politicians with more explicitly evil intent.

The verdict of history? The British public has successfully forgotten about Empire, but lives with the NHS every day. Attlee’s spot in the great Prime Ministers rankings looks secure. The take away for President Obama? America will remember his health care reforms much more vividly than any events that unfold in Iraq or Afghanistan.
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Fact check: Clement Attlee did serve as Deputy Prime Minister as a part of a coalition governing arrangement between Labour, the Liberals and the Conservatives during the war. Churchill served as PM, and chaired the War cabinet. Previously, Attlee was a Major in the British Army during WWI, and gave up a legal career to become a social worker in London before being elected to Parliment.