Clem Attlee

This biography of Clement Attlee, the architect of the NHS and the Welfare State, argues that he is one of only two post-war Prime Ministers who can claim to have changed the society in which we live (the other being Margaret Thatcher). In the years preceding World War II, polarization within British society was acute. The radicalism of the 1918 generation had spent itself in futile gestures and bitter recriminations, resulting in a minimal change in conditions for the poorest Britons. In 1945, however, the Labour government, led by Attlee, took office with the skill and the political will to translate socialist aspirations into legislation - to change the way men and women lived, fundamentally, and in a sense irreversibly.