Major Attlee : Labour's great reformers

Beckett, Francis, 1945-2015

Books, Manuscripts

Find it!
Remove Major Attlee : Labour's great reformers from your current list Save Major Attlee : Labour's great reformers to your current list

Total copies: 1

Available: 1

Availability by location

Place reservation

Summary

In this newly revised and updated edition of his acclaimed biography of post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Francis Beckett argues that, as the architect of the NHS and the Welfare State, 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.