Attlee Quotes
Attlee: I'm one of those people who are incapable of religious feeling.
Harris: Do you mean you have no feeling about Christianity, or that you have no feeling about God, Christ, and life after death?
Attlee: Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can't believe in the mumbo jumbo.
Harris: Would you say you are an agnostic?
Attlee: I don't know.
Harris: Is there an after-life, do you think?
Attlee: Possibly.
Clement Attlee
[Attlee] reminded the delegates that it was vital to reduce costs by greater efficiency, which meant that both employers and employed had to seek in every way to attain it. He did not believe in lowering wages as a means of reducing costs, but equally it was necessary to realize that increases of wages that were not matched by increases of production would gravely impair their chances of getting rapidly over their difficulties. Increased demands for money payments, when there was no increase of goods to meet them led straight away to inflation. There was a danger that when a justifiable advance in wages for an under-paid section of the workers had been granted it resulted in demands from those who had enjoyed higher wages to maintain the same differential. This was bad economics and bad social morality. He had been disturbed at the evidence that some people were abusing the social services in such matters as sickness benefit. They could not have them sabotaged by misuse.
Clement Attlee
Every left of centre party that gets into power is doomed to disappoint – more so, probably, than governments of the right, since the left aspires more definitively to reshape society. It is a phenomenon found around the world in democratic countries. Once into the grind of day to day government, the left's erstwhile supporters will be quick to say that the party lacks direction, or it has betrayed its values, or that its policies are not radical enough, or all three together. The 1945 Attlee government is fondly remembered by many activists as the most radical and accomplished of all Labour regimes. Yet at the time it was vociferously denounced for its timidity and its lack of purpose.
Anthony Giddens
So far as the Labour party is concerned, The Open Society is almost entirely irrelevant. The Labour party from the Webbs to Attlee, though it believed in state-power as the antidote to inequality and competition and misunderstood Stalin's Russia, was neither intellectually Stalinist nor intellectually totalitarian. Its defects were then and are now more domestic and homely – the minority-mindedness and nonconformist conscience which Keynes discerned in Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, the conviction of moral impregnability which makes it intolerant, evasive and querulous when policy conflicts with principle or goodwill stubs its toe on interests, and the sympathy for fads and crankcauses which it inherited from the Liberal party and continues to display in the imprisonment of General Pinochet, the campaign against fox hunting and the nonsense involved in Mr Cook's "ethical foreign policy".
Maurice Cowling
