Here’s one for the aficionados: 26 July 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of Labour’s landslide victory in the 1945 general election.
Trade unionists and Labour MPs are celebrating, claiming the nation still owes a debt of gratitude for the historic achievements of Clement Attlee’s government.
Yet today, as the world watches the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with horror, it’s worth recalling that one of Attlee’s biggest failures was his Israel–Palestine policy.
(Oh, and while Attlee’s health minister Aneurin Bevan boasted he “stuffed their mouths with gold” to overcome doctors’ opposition to the NHS, today doctors are on strike over pay again.)
The 1945 election took place on 5 July, the same date Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Street last year. But with British armed forces still serving overseas in 1945, it took until 26 July to declare the result.
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Labour won 393 seats in 1945, compared with 411 last year. But while Sir Keir’s Labour only won 34% of the votes, Mr Attlee won nearly 50%. But then, there was no insurgent Reform UK back then.
Celebrating the 80th anniversary, Joanne Thomas, who became general secretary of the shopworkers’ union Usdaw in April this year, said the Attlee government left a lasting legacy.
“Usdaw’s predecessor unions were proud to play a role in the 1945 election victory and to see 18 of our members elected,” she said.
“Not least a hero of our union ‘Red Ellen’, a fiery trade union organiser who led the Jarrow hunger march and went on to serve as education minister.”
Wilkinson was indeed red. Attlee biographer Trevor Burridge wrote: “Ellen Wilkinson was made minister of education despite the fact that she had actively campaigned against his leadership.”
She was MP for Jarrow, not a million miles from the current education secretary and Starmer super-loyalist Bridget Phillipson’s Houghton and Sunderland South constituency. But not even her best friends would call her red!
Ellen Wilkinson was also the only woman in Attlee’s 1945 cabinet. Last year, Sir Keir made history by appointing 11 women to his cabinet.
Labour MP Marie Tidball, elected last year, joined the tributes to Attlee. “He transformed Britain for working people and this legacy laid the foundations for Britain today – our NHS, welfare state and homes for heroes.
“Those public services meant I could grow up to fulfil my potential. Labour legend.”
But if Attlee’s NHS, welfare state and nationalisation are viewed as successes by Labour trade unionists and MPs, his government’s policy on Palestine is widely agreed to have been a failure.
In his acclaimed biography of Attlee’s foreign secretary, “Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill”, former Blairite cabinet minister Andrew Adonis wrote: “Why did Bevin get Israel/Palestine so wrong?”
Adonis says Bevin’s policy on Palestine “led to the precise opposite of its declared intention of stability and the peaceful co-existence of the Jewish and Palestinian communities within one state at peace with its neighbours”.
He concluded: “Instead, Bevin’s legacy was a Jewish state of Israel, much larger than even most of its advocates previously favoured, in periodic war and perpetual tension with both its Palestinians and its Arab neighbours.”
Where did Bevin go wrong? Adonis wrote: “In the first place, because, during the three key years 1945-48, he did not agree that his central policy objective was ‘good relations with the United States’.”
Read more from Sky News:
Starmer caught between Trump, Macron and MPs over Palestine
Epstein questions keep coming as White House tightens grip on who answers them
Bob Geldof accuses Israeli authorities of ‘lying’ about starvation in Gaza
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As Sir Keir Starmer prepares to meet Donald Trump in Scotland, 80 years after the historic Attlee victory, that’s clearly not a mistake the current Labour PM has made in his relations with the US president.
“I like your prime minister,” the president said as he arrived in Scotland, “he’s slightly more liberal than I am, but I like him”.
So, 80 years on from Attlee, lessons have been learned. So far, so good, that is.
