Clement Attlee was not a good Prime Minister. Discuss.

[giblets]

You know who got **** done? Hitler. Putting politics aside, he had balls.

[kentonio]

Like I said, that's not much of an achievement.

There are a few million people who are neither sick nor bankrupt because of the NHS who would ferverently disagree with you.

[Aeson]

You know who got **** done? Hitler.

QFT

[Tupac Shakur]

Getting **** done is a vastly overrated quality in a leader. We'd be far better off if we focused more on electing competent managers rather than slick politicians promising us new programs.

[Aeson]

Are you saying we shouldn't elect Hitler?

[Hauldren Collider]

She's a class act and the gold standard for constitutional monarchs.

Oh come on. Juan Carlos I is way better.

[DaShi]

10/10

.

[Dinner]

If we're going by "getting **** done", then Lyndon Johnson was a great president because he pushed through medicare, medicaid, great society, fought the vietnam war, and did the civil rights act. But only the last of these was actually good, so he was a terrible president.

Now I'm going to hide in my trollproof bunker for criticising medicaid/medicare...

LBJ was a great president because he literally halved the poverty rate in America and the mother ****er knew how to get **** done. Sadly, he was done in by Vietnam because he took a principled stand to support a US ally even though it was unpopular.

[Imran Siddiqui]

And no, getting **** done is not what leaders are supposed to do. Getting the right **** done is what leaders are supposed to do. Christ, are we really going to ignore the merits of our leader's actions when judging them? That's ridiculous.

We elect leaders to get **** done and now we're going to complain becuse they did what they were elected to do? Get out of here!

[molly bloom]

Getting **** done is a vastly overrated quality in a leader. We'd be far better off if we focused more on electing competent managers rather than slick politicians promising us new programs.

Except the Welfare State as envisaged in the Beveridge Report wasn't a new programme. And it was implemented successfully by Attlee's government.

Attlee was far from being a slick politician and had the right approach to obstructionist civil servants and recalcitrant doctors.

After the devastation of WWII, thanks to central and local government, over five million new homes were provided.

National and forest parks were instituted, and thanks to the new NHS maternal mortality was reduced to one thirteenth what it was in the 1930s.

The provision of state social services was in fact only the modern version of a long tradition of mutual aid and humanitarianism, reaching back as far as the charitable foundations of the Mediaeval monastic foundations and guilds through to the Tudor Poor Relief in London and entities such as the Speenhamland System.

The United Kingdom also successfully assimilated hundreds of thousands of non-English refugees and immigrants in the immediate post-war period.

Clement Attlee, superstar.

[Tupac Shakur]

George Marshall did more to rebuild England than Attlee did.

[Boris Godunov]

"Once an empty carriage pulled up to Number 10 Downing Street, and Clement Atlee got out of it." --Winston Churchill

[Tupac Shakur]

"A modest man, but then he has so much to be modest about."

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Churchill always denied making that last quote.

[Tupac Shakur]

That's why I didn't attribute it to him.