Aftermath

5 July, 1945. The war in Europe was over, and Britain had emerged the 'victors' of the Second World War, along with the other allied nations. For the first time in over a decade, the country prepared to go to the polls, to decide who would be the new Prime Minister. 

Leading the Conservative Party was Winston Churchill, the man who had led the country through the war and whose party had been in charge before the outbreak of the war. He was a hero - hailed as the man who had held together the uneasy alliance between Communist Russia and highly capitalist America, as well as providing a well needed morale boost for Britain with his now infamous speeches about fighting the Nazis on the beaches with blood, sweat, toil and tears, and so on.

Leading the Labour Party was a man called Clement Attlee. The uncharismatic leader was fighting the war hero at the height of his popularity. In the previous election before the war, the Labour Party had won a mere 154 seats. It was clear to everyone what was going to happen; throughout the campaign, newspapers, foreign ambassadors, members of the public - even members of the Labour Party itself - were positive that the Conservatives would win the election with the greatest of ease. Britain went to the polls on 5 July (although Churchill himself could not vote, due to having forgotten to register), then the country patiently waited three weeks for the result (they had to count the votes of hundreds of thousands of troops, many of whom were still fighting the war, some as far away as Japan, where World War Two was still ongoing).

Life carried on as normal. The News of the World printed a front page article stating that Churchill and the Conservatives had a working majority; and the leader himself flew out to take part in the Potsdam Conference (a meeting between the presidents of Russia and America, which divided up the map of Europe after the fall of the Nazi Regime, where large chunks of Eastern Europe were handed over to the Russians in return for Western Europe keeping Greece, the supposed center of western civilization). The results of the election were expected on 26 July, so on this day Mr. Churchill flew back to the UK, not even bothering to pack properly. Stalin and Eisenhower expected to see him return within a few days.

What happened, therefore, was completely unexpected. Labour won 393 seats; the Conservatives a mere 197. They had just under 50% of the vote - 49.7%, to be precise. Why? Who was Clement Attlee, and how had he - the rather unassuming, uncharismatic Deputy Prime Minister of the Second World War Coalition to Churchill's war hero - managed to win such a great victory?

Attlee was born on this day in 1883, in Putney (London), one of eight children. He studied at a private London school until the age of 18, when he won a place to the University of Oxford to study Modern History (hooray!). His first job, from 1906-09, was working as the manager of a charitable club for working class boys, which was run by his old school. Previous to this, he had been quite a conservative man, but what he saw there convinced him that only significant income redistribution by the state would suffice to lift these children out of poverty, and he therefore became a socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party.

He became involved in local politics, and supported a lot of the more left wing proposals by the Liberal government which came just before World War One - he famously rode a bicycle around the southern counties of England in the summer of 1911, explaining their new National Insurance Act. During World War One, he served in the military (he was heavily involved in the Gallipoli Campaign, which gave him much respect for Churchill as a military strategist), but quickly returned to politics after the conflict was over, becoming mayor for one of London's poorest boroughs. 

As mayor, he implemented many socialist policies, such as forcing the slum landlords to spend much more money on ensuring that their properties were habitable, and also wrote a book, The Social Worker, where he famously wrote that "Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim". In 1922 he was elected as an MP, and he became leader of the Labour Party in 1935, always remaining very much on the left of the party. 

This inherent leftiness was very appealing to the country in July 1945, though it was his endorsement of a report that had been written a few years previously by a rather old Civil Servant which probably really won the election for him. Sir William Beveridge was commissioned in 1941 to write a report on 'Social Insurance and Allied Service', a task so monumentally boring that he put it off for a whole year, then sat down and wrote something completely different to what the original memo had suggested. 

Beveridge proposed that, after the war, the British government set about making a national insurance scheme, old-age pensions, family allowances and a national health service available to everyone in the UK, stating that the nation needed to be freed of the five evils of 'Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness'. The health service, he declared, would be free to all at the point of delivery and available to a person "from the cradle to the grave".

Upon reading the report, Churchill and the other leading Conservatives agreed that the report was a rather nice idea in theory, but in practice would be so monumentally expensive to actually implement that they immediately dismissed it. However, someone in the Ministry of Information didn't get the 'yeah, we're ignoring this one' memo, and thought that it would make a rather nice morale boost for the country.

It did. After being published, it quickly became an immediate bestseller, translated into seven different languages (though I can't actually find a list of what these languages were - I can hardly imagine a typical working class man wanting to read the report in, say, Latin, or worse - German.) and a special pocket edition was produced for troops and resistance fighters. And in the run up to the election, in the summer of 1945, the Labour Party basically adopted it as their manifesto. 

They also promised a return to full employment for all the troops who had fought in the war. This was of particular concern to them, as when their fathers had returned from fighting in World War One, there had been very few jobs available, and unemployment amongst ex-soldiers was rife.  The depression of the thirties was seen as the Conservatives' fault, so Labour, led by Attlee promised that they would help the British to 'win the peace, as well as the war', something which was popularly believed not to have happened after the First World War. 

Of course, it wasn't Attlee who was directly responsible for bringing in the new National Health Service - that monumental task fell to Aneurin Bevan in 1948 - but his principle of Britain as a Welfare State remains to this day, though it is weaker during times of Conservative rule. Attlee also continued his progressiveness after his government had fallen from power - in 1955 he was elevated to the House of Lords, and three years later he established the Homosexual Law Reform Society with Bertrand Russell, a group which aimed to decriminalize being gay, and after nine years of campaigning, succeeded. Sadly, Attlee did not live long enough to see this victory, dying in October 1967, but his post-war reforms live on today, a legacy which earned him the title of Greatest 20th Century Prime Minister by a poll in 2004.