Right here’s one for the aficionados: 26 July 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Labour’s landslide victory within the 1945 normal election.
Commerce unionists and Labour MPs are celebrating, claiming the nation nonetheless owes a debt of gratitude for the historic achievements of Clement Attlee’s authorities.
But at present, because the world watches the humanitarian disaster in Gaza with horror, it’s price recalling that one in all Attlee’s greatest failures was his Israel–Palestine coverage.
(Oh, and whereas Attlee’s well being minister Aneurin Bevan boasted he “stuffed their mouths with gold” to beat medical doctors’ opposition to the NHS, at present medical doctors are on strike over pay once more.)
The 1945 election occurred on 5 July, the identical date Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Road final 12 months. However with British armed forces nonetheless serving abroad in 1945, it took till 26 July to declare the outcome.
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Labour gained 393 seats in 1945, in contrast with 411 final 12 months. However whereas Sir Keir’s Labour solely gained 34% of the votes, Mr Attlee gained practically 50%. However then, there was no rebel Reform UK again then.
Celebrating the eightieth anniversary, Joanne Thomas, who grew to become normal secretary of the shopworkers’ union Usdaw in April this 12 months, mentioned the Attlee authorities left a long-lasting legacy.
“Usdaw’s predecessor unions were proud to play a role in the 1945 election victory and to see 18 of our members elected,” she mentioned.
“Not least a hero of our union ‘Red Ellen’, a fiery trade union organiser who led the Jarrow hunger march and went on to serve as education minister.”
Picture:Pic: AP
Wilkinson was certainly crimson. Attlee biographer Trevor Burridge wrote: “Ellen Wilkinson was made minister of education despite the fact that she had actively campaigned against his leadership.”
She was MP for Jarrow, not one million miles from the present training secretary and Starmer super-loyalist Bridget Phillipson’s Houghton and Sunderland South constituency. However not even her finest mates would name her crimson!
Ellen Wilkinson was additionally the one lady in Attlee’s 1945 cupboard. Final 12 months, Sir Keir made historical past by appointing 11 ladies to his cupboard.
Picture:Ellen Wilkinson as soon as sat with the Jarrow marchers, who walked to St Albans in protest towards poverty. Pic: AP
Labour MP Marie Tidball, elected final 12 months, joined the tributes to Attlee. “He remodeled Britain for working folks and this legacy laid the foundations for Britain at present – our NHS, welfare state and houses for heroes.
“Those public services meant I could grow up to fulfil my potential. Labour legend.”
But when Attlee’s NHS, welfare state and nationalisation are seen as successes by Labour commerce unionists and MPs, his authorities’s coverage on Palestine is broadly agreed to have been a failure.
In his acclaimed biography of Attlee’s overseas secretary, “Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill”, former Blairite cupboard minister Andrew Adonis wrote: “Why did Bevin get Israel/Palestine so wrong?”
Picture:Israel was based in 1948, three years after the Second World Warfare ended. Pic: AP
Adonis says Bevin’s coverage on Palestine “led to the precise opposite of its declared intention of stability and the peaceful co-existence of the Jewish and Palestinian communities within one state at peace with its neighbours”.
He concluded: “Instead, Bevin’s legacy was a Jewish state of Israel, much larger than even most of its advocates previously favoured, in periodic war and perpetual tension with both its Palestinians and its Arab neighbours.”
The place did Bevin go fallacious? Adonis wrote: “In the first place, because, during the three key years 1945-48, he did not agree that his central policy objective was ‘good relations with the United States’.”
As Sir Keir Starmer prepares to satisfy Donald Trump in Scotland, 80 years after the historic Attlee victory, that’s clearly not a mistake the present Labour PM has made in his relations with the US president.
“I like your prime minister,” the president mentioned as he arrived in Scotland, “he’s slightly more liberal than I am, but I like him”.
So, 80 years on from Attlee, classes have been realized. To this point, so good, that’s.
