Monday, 18 February 2019

One Sketch 330) Clement Attlee

Unsung heroes
Don't always come
in Uniform

The prompt on Sketching Every Day today was Dead President ( or Prime Minister). Well, I did consider going down the obvious path with Lincoln or Kennedy, but then I'm a Brit, and their praises have been sung often enough (and in JFK's case, his vices as well). So let's give a cheer for the memory of Clement Attlee. Maybe he suffered by comparison with the colourful and witty Winston Churchill, to whom he was Deputy Prime Minister during world war II. However many people, of whom I am one, would argue that Clement Attlee was a far more effective politician than Churchill - who was absolutely the right man in the right place in 1940, I make no bones about that. Still, it's difficult to make a case that Churchill, had he won the election in 1945, would have done so much for the ordinary person in the UK as Attlee's government did. We would certainly not have had our National Health Service, and it's quite likely that we'd have embarrassed ourselves as a nation trying to hang onto our overseas Empire. Attlee's groundbreaking Labour Government, elected by landslide in 1945, had its share of failures, but considering the almost impossible difficulties they faced, what with the country having been bankrupted by World War II, it's incredible that they achieved as much as they did.

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