by Anthony Painter

Jon Cruddas has turned the biographical political speech into an art-form. His recent Clement Attlee memorial lecture is no exception. In the last year or so he has tackled three, in many ways forgotten or at least distant, Labour party leaders: Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, and now Clement Attlee. This one on Attlee touched on a fundamental historical divide within Labour in a quite profound way.

Labour is divided between romantics and pragmatists. It’s not about new versus old Labour. It’s not about trade unions versus the party or socialists versus social democrats. There are romantics, who emphasise the ideal, the human, the ethical, the relational and the communitarian. Pragmatists emphasise power, policy, practicality and process.

The former have dominated our emotions as a party; the latter have driven the party’s leadership. As William Morris once said, to that arch-technocrat Sidney Webb, “the world is going your way at present, Webb, but it’s not the right way in the end”. In a single quote that sums up the elegiac history of Labour’s romantic disposition.

Cruddas contrasts the “orthodox Attlee” – dry, taciturn, administrative, statist, functional and colourless – with the “unorthodox Attlee”. This Attlee is romantic, visionary, the fire burns in his soul, he’s humanistic, ethical and the passion is intense though burns within. Which is the true Attlee? Cruddas, in a revision of a previously stated view, argues that it is the “unorthodox” Attlee who is the real man.

The whole Labour wrong turn in 1945 argument – which has been fashionable in some New and blue Labour circles – always seemed a strange one for me. A quick look at Attlee’s biography and writings, as Cruddas does eloquently, suggests a complex life and man.

This is someone involved in community action in the East End of London who eschewed privilege in order to pursue justice. He was a Conservative but responded to the poverty and injustice that he saw by becoming Independent Labour Party. If he thought friendly societies and charities could have slayed misery and poverty he would have pursued that. Instead, once he had hold of the state he used it. He fired the big bazooka – to use the phrase of the moment.

Something else always sat uneasily with the notion of the “orthodox Attlee”. There is a little book, published by the left book club in 1937 and written by Attlee, called The Labour party in perspective. There is a chapter that describes the Labour party’s core aims titled the “social objective”. What is the first aim? Freedom. Attlee writes:

“The wealth of a society is in its variety, not its uniformity. Progress is not towards but away from the herd”.

This section shows a deep discomfort and scepticism with the state (channeling William Morris in some respects.) Alongside aims one would expect such as common ownership, equality, security and democracy appears beauty. This is a deeply sensitive, passionate, and human-spirited man.

So how do we explain the “orthodox Attlee”?  Actually, Cruddas wasn’t wrong in his initial assessment of Attlee as a technocrat. But I think it was incomplete. The “orthodox” and “unorthodox” Attlee are two facets of the same man. He was both a romantic and a technocrat. And that is why he was the greatest prime minister of the twentieth century – if not our entire history.

We revere the romantics in our history: Nye Bevan, Tony Benn, and Michael Foot. Romanticism is Labour’s secret code. But honestly, if it had been them, or men like them, in charge in the 1930s, would there have even been a 1945 government? Attlee, an Abraham Lincoln for these shores, held together a cabinet of egotists and delivered emancipatory change. His inner flame was his drive, but he was ultimately a man of practical delivery. And boy did he deliver. Pragmatism is the how; romanticism is the why. Both inform the “what”.

Labour is at its best when both combine. With Attlee, one man embodied both. The problem comes when we have shallow pragmatism with no soul which becomes meaningless or when we have romanticism without a pragmatic anchor. There is an economy to run, security to be protected, public services to be provided effectively, and, yes, elections to be won. Without this grounding, romanticism tends towards sentimentality. Another figure from the Attlee era, Michael Young, got this about right in his Labour party pamphlet Small man: big world:

“There is no salvation in going back to some misty past in which the small man lived in a small world, no salvation in putting multi-coloured maypoles in every city square or even substituting William Morris for the Morris car”.

The pamphlet is a discussion paper for Labour party members to consider how democracy, which requires smallness, can be combined with efficiency, which often requires bigness. It is about how to democratise the new institutions of the state as it was expanded in the Attlee years. And this sums up the dilemmas faced by that generation. They had come through a great depression and a world war. William Morris had to remain a spirit rather than a programme of government.

As Labour confronts its latest renewal, there is much that can be learnt from Attlee the man. Success will come from a romantic spirit and understanding mixed with a pragmatic leadership. Cruddas’s thinking is a crucial one in this endeavour. So is Clement Attlee’s.

Anthony Painter is a writer and critic.

Tags: Anthony Painter, Clement Atlee, freedom, pragmatist, romantic

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