Word: clemently
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...four years and five months as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee had not only given freedom to India, Burma, Ceylon (combined pop. 411 million), he had also given to Britain a new way of life. Some of Attlee's followers called it Socialism; some called it "fair shares for all"; some called it the welfare state. Winston Churchill last week scornfully snarled out another name for it: "Queuetopia." Spendthrift's End? Whatever it was, the regime of queues and 40% taxes and womb-to-tomb security had come to judgment. On Feb. 23, Britain's voters would decide...
These were harsh words to apply to the party headed by Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's cabinet from 1942 to 1945. By temperament, training and conviction, Attlee was as far from being either a spendthrift or a dictator as any man could be. Yet his party's record in power and its program for the future had frightened many a less partisan Briton than Winston Churchill...
Socialist's Beginning. Clement Richard Attlee was born (1883) into a staid, middle-class family in Putney, a staid, middle-class suburb in the southwest section of London. He was tutored at home until he was nine years old-first by his mother, and later by a governess, a Miss Hutchinson, one of whose earlier pupils she remembered as a "strongwilled child" named Winston Churchill. Attlee went off to boarding school at nine, and he has described his subsequent years in terms remarkably like Churchill's account of his own school days. Wrote Attlee...
Shortly after World War I began, Clement Attlee volunteered, fought in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and France with the South Lancashire Regiment and Tank Corps, returned home four years later with a major's crowns, a D.S.O. and the scars of two severe wounds. He went back to Limehouse, and Charles Griffiths, his old army batman, went with him. Despite incessant attacks of dysentery, which Attlee had picked up during the war, he worked all day and many a night as well, speaking at meetings, getting the lads of Limehouse out of trouble and lending his kind, mild counsel to anyone...
Certainly men such as Clement Attlee are not avid for arbitrary power. But whatever they do or do not seek, it is a fact that Socialism destroys some of the bases of personal independence. Britain's strict labor control laws have been rarely invoked in the last five years. So far, only 657 applications for permission to change jobs have been actually refused, but the laws remain on the books and there is no doubt that thousands of workers are hesitant to change their jobs because of them. Some Laborites, e.g., Nye Bevan, regularly use the vocabulary of class...