235. Clem against the Evil Giants

In the July 1945 general election, the British public offered Winston Churchill, as he put it himself, the ‘order of the boot’. A victorious war Prime Minister was kicked out. In his place, his deputy, the Labour leader Clem Attlee became Prime Minister.

There was massive enthusiasm for the Attlee government in the working class, which extended to many soldiers. These were the people let down after the First World War when the promise of a ‘Land fit for Heroes’ was betrayed. They, and the government they elected, weren’t going to let that happen again.

But does that mean that the Attlee government was socialist? In this episode, we study the social reforms it introduced and how they built on advances made by earlier radicals, many of whom were not socialist. In particular, the principal inspiration for those reforms came from William Beveridge, author of the Beveridge Report. Far from being a socialist, he was a Liberal, even briefly a Liberal MP.

He'd identified five giant evils, want, ignorance, squalor, disease and idleness. This episode looks at the reforms designed to address the first four of these. The fifth, idleness, we’ll return to later.

Illustration: Nye Bevan talking to a patient in Park Hospital, Trafford, Manchester, on the first day of the NHS, 5 July 1948. Image: Trafford Healthcare NHS/PA Wire

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License