David Blunkett was on Today this morning talking about the state of the Labour Party, and he suggested that Ed Miliband's uncharismatic placidity was reminiscent of Clement Attlee. It's a comparison that has been made by others - most notably by Ken Livingstone - and it's easy to see the appeal of such a claim. But does it hold water?
To start with, there are difference of experience between the two men.
Attlee had been an MP for 23 years by the time he got to be prime minister; assuming Miliband wins the next election (which I've never believed), he'll have been an MP for just ten. Attlee had served in the governments of Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s and '30s, and been deputy prime minister for three years under Winston Churchill; Miliband had less than two years as secretary for energy and climate change under Gordon Brown.
If one were being cruel, one might also add that Attlee saw active service - and was wounded - in the First World War, at an age when Miliband was the junior member of Gordon Brown's inner circle.
But the crucial difference is surely that Attlee was surrounded by a team of big hitters. Miliband can hardly claim the same. Here are perhaps the key members of Attlee's government in 1945, with their modern Labour front-bench counterparts in brackets afterwards:
Chancellor: Hugh Dalton (Ed Balls)
Foreign affairs: Ernest Bevin (Douglas Alexander)
Home affairs: James Chuter Ede (Yvette Cooper)
Health: Aneurin Bevan (Andy Burnham)
Education: Ellen Wilkinson (Stephen Twigg)
Trade: Stafford Cripps (Chuka Umunna)
Commons leader: Herbert Morrison (Angela Eagle)
Fuel and power: Manny Shinwell (Caroline Flint)
Lord chancellor: William Jowitt (Sadiq Khan)
If you were drawing up a dream team from members of Attlee's cabinet and Miliband's shadow cabinet, how many of the latter would you include?
Showing posts with label Clement Atlee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clement Atlee. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 August 2013
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Let Us Now Praise... Lewis Silkin
The 1945 Labour government headed by Clement Atlee was packed full of giant political figures. So much so that some of its members tend to get unfairly neglected, chief among them the great Lewis Silkin.
Back in his time on the London County Council, Silkin had been instrumental in introducing the green belt policy. Now in government, he introduced three massive pieces of legislation that transformed the country just as surely as did the more celebrated health and education reforms of the time: the New Towns Act in 1946, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949.
These were genuinely socialist reforms, for which campaigners had been fighting for years. In the case of the Planning Act, the struggle to gain democratic control of development went back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: a century on from the Public Health Act of 1848, Silkin's Act finally made all new development subject to statutory oversight by local authorities. It also allowed compulsory purchase, facilitating new construction for the common good, and introduced the concept of listing buildings of architectural or historical merit, so that they might be preserved for the nation.
No more were the concerns of individuals to be placed above those of communities. Clough Williams Ellis, the creator of Portmeirion, whose wife was a member of the Communist Party and who own sympathies lay in that direction, called the Act 'an encouraging sign of returning sanity' after the horrors of the Second World War.
But that was then, and this is now. And in modern Britain, where political polarities so often seem to be reversed, we find the right-wing Daily Telegraph campaigning against the coalition's plans to relax planning laws, and the left, most notably Vanessa Redgrave, fighting for the right of travellers to remain at Dale Farm in Essex, in the face of decisions made by the local planning authorities.
Even more confusingly, the local authority concerned is Basildon - one of the towns established in the late-1940s under Silkin's New Towns Act.
As ever when political morality becomes confused, one should look back at that great post-War government and ask: What would Lewis Silkin do?
Back in his time on the London County Council, Silkin had been instrumental in introducing the green belt policy. Now in government, he introduced three massive pieces of legislation that transformed the country just as surely as did the more celebrated health and education reforms of the time: the New Towns Act in 1946, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949.
These were genuinely socialist reforms, for which campaigners had been fighting for years. In the case of the Planning Act, the struggle to gain democratic control of development went back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: a century on from the Public Health Act of 1848, Silkin's Act finally made all new development subject to statutory oversight by local authorities. It also allowed compulsory purchase, facilitating new construction for the common good, and introduced the concept of listing buildings of architectural or historical merit, so that they might be preserved for the nation.
No more were the concerns of individuals to be placed above those of communities. Clough Williams Ellis, the creator of Portmeirion, whose wife was a member of the Communist Party and who own sympathies lay in that direction, called the Act 'an encouraging sign of returning sanity' after the horrors of the Second World War.
But that was then, and this is now. And in modern Britain, where political polarities so often seem to be reversed, we find the right-wing Daily Telegraph campaigning against the coalition's plans to relax planning laws, and the left, most notably Vanessa Redgrave, fighting for the right of travellers to remain at Dale Farm in Essex, in the face of decisions made by the local planning authorities.
Even more confusingly, the local authority concerned is Basildon - one of the towns established in the late-1940s under Silkin's New Towns Act.
As ever when political morality becomes confused, one should look back at that great post-War government and ask: What would Lewis Silkin do?
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