Atlee won the popular vote in 1951 after clawing back a Tory poll lead of 11,% in late September which was down to 4.5% by mid-October and had evaporated and become a 4.51% surplus over the Tory vote in the final result.
The 1951 United Kingdom general election was held twenty months after the 1950 general election, which the Labour Party had won with a slim majority of just five seats. The Labour government called the general election for Thursday 25 October 1951 hoping to increase their parliamentary majority. However, despite winning the popular vote and receiving the largest percentage of the vote, the Labour Party was defeated by the Conservative Party who had won the most seats. This election marked the beginning of the Labour Party’s thirteen-year spell in opposition, and the return of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1951Background%5Bedit]
Clement Attlee had decided to call the election after the King’s concerns over leaving the country to go on his Commonwealth tour in 1952 with a government that had such a slim majority, that there was danger of a change of government in his absence.[1] (As it transpired the King became too ill to travel and delegated the tour to his daughter Princess Elizabeth shortly before his death in February 1952.)
The Labour government, which by now had implemented most of its 1945 election manifesto, was now beginning to lose many cabinet ministers such as Ernest Bevin and Stafford Cripps due to old age. The Conservatives however, due to the previous year’s election, appeared fresher, with more new MPs.
Campaign[edit]
As Labour began to have some policy divisions during the election campaign, the Conservatives ran an efficient campaign that was well-funded and orchestrated. Their manifesto Britain Strong and Free stressed that safeguarding “our traditional way of life” was integral to the Conservative purpose. They did not propose to dismantle the welfare state or the National Health Service which the Labour Government had established.[2] As for the Liberals, the poor election results in 1950 only worsened.[3]
Four candidates were returned unopposed, all in Northern Ireland. This was the last general election in which any candidates were returned unopposed, although there have since been unopposed by-elections.[4]
The subsequent Labour defeat was significant for several reasons: the party polled almost a quarter of a million votes more than the Conservatives and their National Liberal allies combined, won the most votes that Labour had ever won (as of 2015) and won the most votes of any political party in any election in British political history, a record not surpassed until the Conservative Party‘s victory in 1992. Despite this, it was the Conservatives who formed the next government with a majority of 17 seats. Under the first past the post electoral system, many Labour votes were “wasted” as part of large majorities for MPs in safe seats rather than into holding onto marginal seats. It should also be noted that most of Labour’s overall popular vote margin can be accounted for as being the votes not polled by the Conservatives’s Ulster Unionist allies in the four constituencies (all safe UUP seats) in which they were unopposed – the UUP would poll 166,400 votes in these four constituencies four years later. This was the fourth of five elections in the twentieth century where a party lost the popular vote, but won the most seats. The others were January 1910, December 1910, 1929 and February 1974; it also happened at the 1874 election.
CIA involvement in the Labour Party: 1945-2008
Started by John Simkin, July 14, 2008
1 post in this topic
Posted July 14, 2008
Attempts by the CIA to destabilise Labour governments began with the Clement Atlee government (1945-51). The Strategic Services Unit (SSU) that in 1947 became the CIA had an interesting relationship with the Labour Party. They favoured its anti-imperialist policies that promised an end to the British Empire. However, they totally opposed its socialist domestic policies.
They concentrated on turning the party to the right. This is best explained by Tom Braden, a senior official in the CIA, who was head of the International Organizations Division (IOD) during this period. He explained in an interview that was included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975):
It never had to account for the money it spent except to the President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But otherwise the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them – “unvouchered funds” meaning expenditures that don’t have to be accounted for…. If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe – a Labour leader – suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he’s working well and doing a good job – he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody… I don’t mean to imply that there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents. They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work well…. Politicians in Europe, particularly right after the war, got a lot of money from the CIA….
Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee – no committee said to it – “You can only have so many men.” It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war – the secret war…. It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.
Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target – that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money. They set up a successful communist labor union in France right after the war. We countered it with Force Ouvriere. They set up this very successful communist labor union in Italy, and we countered it with another union…. We had a vast project targeted on the intellectuals – “the battle for Picasso’s mind,” if you will. The communists set up fronts which they effectively enticed a great many particularly the French intellectuals to join. We tried to set up a counterfront. (This was done through funding of social and cultural organizations such as the Pan-American Foundation, the International Marketing Institute, the International Development Foundation, the American Society of African Culture, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom.) I think the budget for the Congress of Cultural Freedom one year that I had charge of it was about $800,000, $900,000, which included, of course, the subsidy for the Congress’s magazine, Encounter. That doesn’t mean that everybody that worked for Encounter or everybody who wrote for Encounter knew anything about it. Most of the people who worked for Encounter and all but one of the men who ran it had no idea that it was paid for by the CIA.
This strategy was highly successful with trade union leaders such as Arthur Deakin, the General Secretary of the TUC and in young MPs like Hugh Gaitskell, George Brown, James Callaghan and Denis Healey who were considered to be future leaders of the party.
Harold Wilson was not turned during this period. He was the youngest member of the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. What is more, while many Labour colleagues were accepting freebies from Americans and going to the United States for holidays, Wilson was travelling east, fixing trade deals with the Soviet Union.
When Hugh Gaitskell died in 1963, Wilson was able to defeat his right-wing rivals, George Brown and James Callaghan. MI5 and the CIA became disturbed by this development. As Peter Wright explained in Spycatcher:
Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilson’s predecessor as Leader of the Labour Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I had met him and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall about a month before he died he told me that he was going to Russia.
After he died his doctor got in touch with MI5 and asked to see somebody from the Service. Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian Counterespionage, went to see him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the manner of Gaitskell’s death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus disseminata, which attacks the body’s organs. He said that it was rare in temperate climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere recently where he could have contracted the disease.
Arthur Martin suggested that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and microbiological laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor in the chemical warfare laboratory. Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice. He said that nobody knew how one contracted lupus. There was some suspicion that it might be a form of fungus and he did hot have the foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the disease. I came back and made my report in these terms.
The next development was that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few years of his service he had had some contacts with Department 13, which was known as the Department of Wet Affairs in the KGB. This department was responsible for organizing assassinations. He said that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level political assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the top place. He did not know which country it was planned in but he pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was a man called General Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just returned on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge of the political scene in England.
During the 1964 General Election campaign Wilson promised to modernize Britain. Making full use of his academic background and poking fun at the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home, Wilson was able to obtain a five-seat majority in the House of Commons. After the 1966 General Election this majority was increased to 97.
Wilson was fairly successful in his promise to modernize Britain. His government brought an end to capital punishment, reformed the divorce laws and legalized abortion and homosexuality. However, he failed in his attempt to take on the Whitehall security establishment in the so-called D-notice Affair.
Wilson had more difficulty with the economy and in November, 1967, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, was forced to devalue the pound. Wilson believed that it was the far right in both Britain and the United States that had undermined the UK economy. By the end of the 1960s, with unemployment and inflation increasing, Wilson’s popularity declined and the Conservative Party, led by Edward Heath, won the 1970 General Election.
The Labour Party was re-elected to power in 1974. We now know that this victory triggered a plot that attempted to destabilise the government. This conspiracy involved several intelligence agencies, including MI5, CIA, and BOSS. This right-wing cabal also included various military people such as General Walter Walker and David Stirling (SAS).
There are several sources that confirm this plot. This includes MI5 officer, Peter Wright (Spycatcher), Colin Wallace, the British Army’s psychological operations officer who was working in Northern Ireland during this period (Who Framed Colin Wallace?) and Gordon Winter, a BOSS agent (Inside BOSS). All three men were actually involved in this plot against Wilson.
We also have the testimony of Harold Wilson who gave his material to the journalists, Barry Penrose and Roger Couriour (The Pencourt File). This included information about how his circle were being repeatedly burgled. He was also being provided with information from George Wigg, who had good contacts within MI5 (It was Wigg who had disclosed the Profumo Affair).
In fact, we now know that this campaign was not only against the Labour government but also against the Liberal Party and Edward Heath and his closest political allies (Wallace and Winter). Jeremy Thorpe got smeared with the Norman Scott material and Peter Hain got prosecuted for bank robbery. Thorpe and Hain were not convicted but the cases severely damaged the Liberal Party. The most successful smear campaign was against Heath and as a result the right-wing cabal got a hard-line Tory government in 1979 that created mass-employment and destroyed the power of the trade unions. Not surprisingly, Thatcher was the most unpopular politician in British history and was only saved by the Falklands War.
A recently released document shows that MI5 began the campaign against Edward Heath as early as 1972. George Kennedy Young, the SIS deputy director, wrote that “The Queer (Heath) will be overthrown”. Another interesting factor was that Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager was Airey Neave. During the Second World War he was recruited into M19, a branch of M16 responsible for the support of the French Resistance. After the war he remained in close contact with the intelligence community and in opposition was Thatcher’s spokesperson on Northern Ireland. In 1976 Neave approached Colin Wallace and asked him to provide “dirt” on the Labour Party.
In 1976 Wilson decided to resign from office and was replaced by James Callaghan. Wilson tried to get Callaghan to carry on this investigation but understandably he refused.
Interestingly, the CIA chief in London during this period was Cord Meyer, who worked as Tom Braden’s deputy International Organizations Division (IOD) during Atlee’s government. Later he was to become head of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control the world media.
After the defeat of James Callaghan in 1979 Labour remained out of power until 1997. Of course, by this time, the Labour Party had a leader who was completely under the control of MI5/CIA
THE ROVIAN TURN IN ELECTION PUNDITRY, LIES DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS. #CORBYN4PM
May 06, 2017 THE ROVIAN TURN IN ELECTION PUNDITRY, LIES DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS. #CORBYN4PM
The scripted narrative will surely deliver a Tory landslide or will it? We will see tomorrow how strong the Establishment spin machine remains in France. There seems to be rather a lot of Rovian type telekinesis being practised by the Neo-Liberal apologists who invariably do not acknowledge their ideological master.
Quick #GE2017 forecast using #LE2017 BBC Projected National Shares (method here: https://t.co/g89Ozq7PK3):
Con 43%, Lab 27%, LD 15%, UKIP 6%— Chris Prosser (@caprosser) May 5, 2017
What more evidence do they need? What more proof do the Labour leadership and its supporters require? This was not an opinion poll.
Funny that suddenly everyone seems to have forget that polls were giving Tories a 20% lead. Actual result: 11% lead. Turn out: 26%!
If anything, it looks like the Tories are not on course to the crushing parliamentary majority that they wished for. And on that kind of turnout, it could only take a 35% turnout on the 8th of June to turn the GE into squeaky bum time for the Maybot.
— Roger Glyndwr Lewis (@RogerGLewis) May 11, 2017
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http://www.historytoday.com/robert-pearce/1950-and-1951-general-elections-britain
The Starting Point
First, we should make a virtue of what we do understand – the nature of Labour’s victory in 1945. Did the reasons for Labour’s great victory have any relevance in 1950 and 1951?
The causes of the ’45 victory can be simply summarised:
- Labour was more in tune than the Conservatives with public opinion, especially with the wartime ethos of equality and ‘fair shares’ and with hopes for a new welfare state. Hence its manifesto promises had wide appeal.
- Labour had a better front bench team than the Conservatives, appearing both more talented and more trustworthy.
- In the improvised campaign of 1945 Labour’s electoral machinery was no longer inferior to that of its rival.
- The British ‘first past the post’ system gave Labour a huge majority of seats (just over 61 per cent) even though they won less than half of the popular vote.
Labour’s Achievements
Undoubtedly Labour had promised more than the Conservatives in the 1945 election. Yet such promises, while resulting in temporary popularity in the polls, might turn out to be hostages to fortune. Such had been the case with the Lloyd George Coalition, elected at the end of the First World War. Yet Labour exhibited a steely determination to make Britain a better place in which to live, and the 1945-50 administration goes down in history as the government that fulfilled more of its promises than any other.
In total, the 1945 parliament passed no fewer than 347 acts of parliament. Clearly there is no opportunity here to focus on details, but we do need to be aware of broad contours. On the home front, the Beveridge report was implemented, with the National Insurance Act of 1946 and the National Assistance Act of 1948. Furthermore, Labour inaugurated the National Health Service in 1948 (generally seen as one of the most valuable reforms in the whole of British history), built over a million new houses, and raised the school leaving age to 15. Labour also fulfilled its promise to nationalise key areas of British industry, including the coal mines, the railways, gas and electricity. Externally, Labour granted independence to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma, pulled out of Palestine, and helped set up an important new security pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Inevitably the 1950 general election revolved around Labour’s record in office. Had they done enough to earn re-election? The party chairman claimed at the 1950 annual conference that ‘Poverty has been abolished, hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folk are cherished, our children are growing up in a land of plenty.’ Yet against this seductive exaggeration – and even against Labour’s modest 1950 manifesto statement that ‘By and large the first majority Labour Government has served the country well’ – could be set postwar shortages, continuing rationing and high taxation, a series of financial crises, and general drab austerity. (The little bit of fun and glamour for which Labour was responsible, the Festival of Britain in May-September 1951, came too late to change perceptions of the period.) Objectively, it was a mixed record, as is that of every government, but what mattered at the polls were voters’ subjective responses, which reflected a mixed bag of concerns, including personalities as well as policies.
Attlee and his Ministers
Even some Conservative politicians, like Harold Macmillan, admitted that Labour’s ministerial team constituted an exceptionally talented group of people. Labour had seemed to dominate the home front during the war, thanks to Winston Churchill’s willingness to promote so many politicians outside his own Conservative party. Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Dalton, Cripps, Bevan – here was a formidable team indeed. Yet by 1950, and even more by 1951, some of the gloss had been removed.
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Completing ‘Super-Smart Democracies: Dissolving Neoliberalism, Managerialism and Elitism’. Former Research Fellow in Participation Research Unit at MBS.
May 2
SHARING ATTLEE’S DNA
… to meet the significant economic and social challenge we face…requires a government with the sort of progressive reforming zeal typified, albeit in very different ways, by Clement Attlee or Tony Blair.
Observer Editorial.April 9 2017i
To which David Murray responded:
… your editorial (“May must focus on deep-seated structural ills, not just Brexit”) last week mentions Clement Attlee and Tony Blair in the same breath: leading, progressive, reforming governments with zeal, “albeit in very different ways”. Not half.
Before his government, though bankrupt, founded the National Health Service and built more than a million homes, Attlee, who was voted the greatest prime minister of the 20th century, became and called himself a socialist.
Thus, Attlee is not an easy figure for New Labour or an Observer editorial to appropriate.
On the other hand, Blair’s toxic legacy was to prolong Thatcherism…
The implied comparison between Jeremy Corbyn, Blair and Attlee is invalid, though, because Blair was not trying to return a belief system to its roots, which Corbyn is, those roots being closer to the socialism of Attlee than the New Labour of Blair.
No doubt Mr. Murray could have gone into much greater detail to dismiss the Observer’s false equivalence between a great British Prime Minister, Clem Attlee, and a despicable one, Tony Blair, as could I, but I won’t waste my time or yours on so tedious a subject.
Getting the Hang of Super-Smart Democracies
From ‘Sharing Attlee’s DNA’ you will see that I am a fervent admirer of the legacy of social and economic reform that Democratic Socialists such as Clement Attlee built up in the first half of the 20th Century. It is to the immense credit of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers that they are trying to preserve and build upon that legacy.
Perhaps Mt Trump will be in receipt of similar reports from his CIA resident in London.
´´Óbservers Agree that the Election campaign has been relatively quiet and attribute this to a serious British Electorate thinking hard about the issues.´´
The British Electorate may deliver a trump style FU moment to the British and international Neo-Liberal Establishment. It has been shown that in spite of David Cameron and George Osbourne assuring we in the Precariat that we are all in this together we have seen the huge rises in the wealth of the top of society and particularly of the Bankers whose bacon we saved back in 2008.
The NHS is not safe with Theresa May and her Neo-Liberal Fake conservatives
Brexit is not safe with Theresa May and her Fake Neo-Liberal Tories
The truth and freedom of speech are not safe with Theresa May and her Fake Neo-Liberal Tories.
MICHAEL MOORE IN TRUMPLAND , THE **HANGINCHADDOW*
Moore asks his audience permission to read something he had just written in the official Hotel recommended to acts appearing at the hosting theatre, he sits at a desk with his ring bound folder. A scholarly setting redolent of fire side chats beloved of broadcaster continuity over festive holidays. Suitably posed Moore reads his freshly penned polemic and it is this polemic which appears on the Internet. Top trending on reddit and hurriedly ripped and pasted around the web the source of course missing. Rumours abound that it is not even Moore speaking these words. The words he speaks are powerful and cut through to the essence of the deep anger sadness and confusion of the American people. This righteous anger Moore concludes will lead to ´´The biggest Fu ever delivered´´. A Trump Victory in the presidential race of 2016.
Moore’s polemic is an extraordinarily powerful summation of the failure of the Establishment of the four Estates and nails the injustice and the inequality which the United States has come to be associated with in ´Awake ´circles, both in the US and abroad.
In a strange way, Theresa Mat is the Fake Tory Neo-Liberal Version of Hilary Clinton, a terrible candidate with an appallingly low-grade front bench. In truth the Tories are in the midst of the same Bastard problem that John Major battled with. Boris Johnson wobbles goofily in the back ground waiting to unleash his own brand of incipid entitled privilege on the unsuspecting ´´Thoughtful´British Electorate.
Don’t Get Fooled again.
A NOTE ON NEO LIBERAL MANIAS. ACTUALITÉ IN POLITICAL JOURNALISM (SIC) ESCAPE THE NEO LIBERAL MAY-TRIX
An old Etonian Toff
was often noted to scoff
was often noted to scoff
Whilst Brosiering His dame
Economical actualité is the name of the game
I’ll tax the upper Crust off your pasty
now your all Fagging for me
I always preferred Cheshire Porky Pies
In Cuisine and in Deed you see.
Clark left Parliament in 1992 following Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power. His admission during the Matrix Churchill trial that he had been “economical with the actualité ” in answer to parliamentary questions about what he knew with regard to arms export licences to Iraq, caused the collapse of the trial and the establishment of the Scott Inquiry, which helped undermine John Major‘s government.[31]
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