Opinion of Clement Attlee

[Filuwaúrdjan]

FF, obviously.

During his career he was underrated to an extent that seems almost hilarious today (something that worked out very well for him, of course. He was one of the best manipulators of factionalism and internal party divisions in British political history). Constitutionally, he also makes an interesting contrast to later more "Presidential" Prime Ministers (that is, almost all of them).

As a point of random interest, he had an accent that you just don't hear nowadays, a very old-fashioned professional middle class one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6fGNbApKwk

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As a point of random interest, he had an accent that you just don't hear nowadays, a very old-fashioned professional middle class one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6fGNbApKwk

Wow.  I had never heard his voice before.  That parts of his answer border on incomprehensible.

There was an amusing incident during one of Labour's first party political broadcasts (ie; tv ads) in the mid '50's; the setup for this one was that a man would read Attlee questions relating to the manifesto, election issues and so on. He answered almost all of them with "yes" or "no" and finished the questions halfway through the broadcast. The poor man interviewing him then had to make up new questions to fill time...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

and all brits, in somne way or another, were Imperialists at the time.

lol

There was a famous survey done not many years after the end of the war (I forget the date) in which it was found that a majority of the population could not name a single colony. The reality is that Empire was not part of the reality of Working Class life in Britain (outside some of the ports and a couple of big inland cities with lots of (Irish and-or Jewish) immigrants... and in both it was more a rallying cry for xenophobia than a reality, as such...), except in a crude economic sense (and even then not everywhere; the well-known extreme dependence of East Lancashire on imperial markets* was unusual).

Now you could make the argument that everyone (or almost everyone) of Churchill's age-and-class was an imperialist at that time, and you'd be right.

*As in that dreadful pun of J.B.Priestley's... "Blackburn expects every man to do his dhootie".