Here’s a Christmas quiz: Which has been Britain’s most left-wing government? According to Paul Ormerod, it’s not the one you think...
. The extended Christmas holidays loom. One way of filling the time is to think about crucial questions such as who is England’s greatest ever batsman, which football club side is the best the world has ever seen? A more esoteric variant is to contemplate which has been Britain’s most left-wing government? At first sight, the answer is obvious.
It is surely Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government from 1945 to 1951. When elected in July 1945, the government did face massive problems. Millions of men were in the armed forces and needed to be reabsorbed into the civilian labour force.
Substantial numbers of houses and factories had been destroyed by German bombing. Much of the rest of the country’s capital equipment had been run at maximum capacity during the war and was on the verge of collapse. We owed vast sums to the Americans for supplying us with military equipment.
In response, Attlee and his cabinet did enact traditional socialist measures such as the nationalisation of steel, electricity, gas, coal and the railways. In fact, in total around 20 per cent of the entire economy was taken into public hands. The National Health Service was set up, based on the then fashionable idea of central planning.
It was the first of its kind. Other European countries subsequently had the sense not to copy it and have a mixture of public a.
