It is 70 years since Clement Attlee formed his landmark Labour government after winning a 146-seat majority in July 1945. How distant such success seems to today’s party. These days, associating oneself with Attlee has become the equivalent of evoking God in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. God means different things to different people, however.
Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters see in Attlee both the victorious outsider and the embodiment of Ken Loach’s “spirit of ’45” – the moment when the British public showed it had just been waiting for a truly socialist agenda. Such comforting myths, recently recycled by Owen Jones, Billy Bragg and Clare Short, are not new. When Attlee’s majority was reduced to five seats in February 1950, despite Labour having won an even higher portion of the popular vote than in 1945, Richard Crossman consoled himself that 13 million people had voted for pure socialism. Forget the loss of more than a hundred seats – this was progress!
Content from our partners
