Attlee not Labour Leader in 1945

Let's say as WWII rolls to a close, Clement Attlee passes away or is incapacitated to the point where he can't function properly as leader of the Labour Party.

Whoes likely to take his place and most probably set to become Prime Minister and how does it change post-war events?
 
Almost certainly it would be Herbert Morrison. The big change would be that he wanted local councils to have control over healthcare provision in their areas as opposed to the mammoth nationally run NHS set up by Bevan.

Everything else would be as IOTL.
 
Almost certainly it would be Herbert Morrison. The big change would be that he wanted local councils to have control over healthcare provision in their areas as opposed to the mammoth nationally run NHS set up by Bevan.

Everything else would be as IOTL.

So I suppose NHS would look something like Medicaid in the United States, insofar as it would be a bunch of locally-run medical providers which would be funded by the national government (as Medicaid is a bunch of state-run last-resort insurance programs partially funded by the national government)?
 
So I suppose NHS would look something like Medicaid in the United States, insofar as it would be a bunch of locally-run medical providers which would be funded by the national government (as Medicaid is a bunch of state-run last-resort insurance programs partially funded by the national government)?

No. Morrison wasn't arguing for an insurance system or anything like that. His position was basically that there should be essentially a recognisable NHS, but instead of it being a Whitehall command and control operation, as Bevan wanted (and essentially got) it should be run first and foremost by the local authorities. (Morrison was a local party boss who had run local government in London, so obviously he was coming at it from that angle)
 
No. Morrison wasn't arguing for an insurance system or anything like that. His position was basically that there should be essentially a recognisable NHS, but instead of it being a Whitehall command and control operation, as Bevan wanted (and essentially got) it should be run first and foremost by the local authorities. (Morrison was a local party boss who had run local government in London, so obviously he was coming at it from that angle)

In other words it would be the NHS with a whole hell of a lot of corruption and incompetence on top :p
 
No. Morrison wasn't arguing for an insurance system or anything like that. His position was basically that there should be essentially a recognisable NHS, but instead of it being a Whitehall command and control operation, as Bevan wanted (and essentially got) it should be run first and foremost by the local authorities. (Morrison was a local party boss who had run local government in London, so obviously he was coming at it from that angle)

Well, that's what I meant, not that it would be just some sort of insurance scheme. That's why I said "insofar as it would be locally-run" and tried to qualify it so that that would be recognizable, although I suppose I didn't qualify it well enough. I was thinking of a Medicaid-VA hybrid, where you have VA-type facilities (ie., owned and operated by the government), only run by local governments (in this case, presumably cities and counties using state and federal funding).

Perhaps a better analogy would be the US school system, only with hospitals, clinics, and doctor's offices instead of schools.
 
Morrison really? I thought he was pretty much not popular outside of his London stomping grounds?
 
Well he was the Deputy Leader and if the scenario was Atlee dying or being incapacitated shortly before the election then Labour would probably have wanted to have a quick contest that would minimise the chances of a split. One of Atlee's greatest achievements, like Wilson 20 years later, was in managing to keep a bunch of stupendous egos, all of whom thought they would be a better leader than him, functioning as a coherrent government for so long. Whether Morrison could have managed the same act is a good question!
 

Thande

Donor
Well he was the Deputy Leader and if the scenario was Atlee dying or being incapacitated shortly before the election then Labour would probably have wanted to have a quick contest that would minimise the chances of a split. One of Atlee's greatest achievements, like Wilson 20 years later, was in managing to keep a bunch of stupendous egos, all of whom thought they would be a better leader than him, functioning as a coherrent government for so long. Whether Morrison could have managed the same act is a good question!

I don't know if he could. I could see a situation where Labour win a big majority like OTL despite being in the middle of a leadership kerfuffle (the National Government was unpopular enough that Labour are going to win even if a trained monkey is in charge) and then the party either fragments or you get dissident MPs joining the other left wing movements that briefly got into power in the 1945-50 parliament due to the craze for minor parties as there hadn't been an election for ten years.
 
In other words it would be the NHS with a whole hell of a lot of corruption and incompetence on top :p

I don't know about the corruption but the modern NHS certainly has a lot of incompetence. :mad:

This is an issue where I would have been with Morrison, the Bevan model worked well at first but from the 1960's on it became increasingly bureaucratic and top heavy. In countries like France and Italy the health system is much more locally run and there isn't the same problem with layers of management who are there to implement the latest ministerial brainwave.

If done properly it would also have made health care more directly accountable to the people it serves rather than a convoluted chain of ministers and quangos. It could also have made local government something that mattered instead of just having the things that Whitehall didn't think were sexy enough.
 

Thande

Donor
It could have worked but it would require there to be some system where council spending was controlled and pegged to national tax rates, or else you end up with the situation that led to the community charge and all that kerfuffle, years later.
 
Morrison really? I thought he was pretty much not popular outside of his London stomping grounds?

Morrison was Atlee's heir-apparent, and I don't see any real alternative assuming it's pre-1945. Could Bevin perhaps be convinced into running? Somehow I doubt it, although I don't know what relations were like between him and Morrison. Don't think they liked each other though. Not many did with Morrison.
 
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If Morrison hadn't lost his seat by a mere handful of votes in 1931 he quite possibly would have become leader of the Labour Party when George Lansbury resigned in 1935 or 36. Attlee became Labour leader for the same reason that Hague took charge of the Tories after 1997 - more likely leaders had been swept aside by the scale of prior election defeats.

Of course Morrison rather than Attlee in charge during the Second World War will have all kinds of unquantifiable butterflies.
 
Depending on how far back Attlee is removed from the timeline, this could make a big difference. If Morrison beats Attlee in 1935, then it's likely that Labour will support a coalition under Halifax instead of Churchill in 1940 (as Morrison, contravening Attlee, wanted to), and Halifax as PM obviously means big differences for WWII.

Skipping forward to 1945, Morrison opposed leaving the coalition and forcing a general election. So if he is leader before VE Day, Labour will stay in the coalition until at least VJ Day, possibly longer. This would allow Churchill to delay things until he is ready (and might concievably weaken Labour as an opposition party), just possibly allowing the Tories to win or at least keep Labour's majority small and limit what it can do in government. There's also a chance that Morrison might be persuaded to commit Labour to a joint platform with the Tories, especially if delaying the election and sticking with the Tories through to the Autumn leads to some bye-election victories for the far left (Morrison seems to have been quite certain that Labour couldn't win in 1945).

If Labour does win and Morrison becomes Prime Minister, his government will be less radical than Attlee's was. I don't think he'll appoint a broad-church Cabinet - no Bevan, no Shinwell, possibly no Ellen Wilkinson, maybe even no Stafford Cripps. The initial raft of nationalisations will go ahead, but the programme will stop dead in 1947. Reforms and modernisations in healthcare, education, social security, etc., will be less sweeping and structured to preserve an even greater degree of private provision and local authority control than was kept in OTL. However, and slightly bizarrely, the house-building programme will be controlled by Whitehall rather than by local authorities, and will slow significantly when industry later complains about the amount of materials going into housing (assuming Morrison's criticisms of Bevan on housing were genuine, rather than just attacks on a rival). There will be considerable disatisfaction mid-way through the Parliament and both Bevan and (with greater chance of success) either Dalton or Cripps, might challenge for the leadership at that point.

Morrison's choice of Foreign Secretary will be crucial, as his own handling of foreign affairs will be disastrous (as it was during his brief tenure as Foreign Secretary). On the one hand, he will be more supine than Attlee was to the Americans; on the other, where there are policies with which he cannot agree, he won't be able to handle arguments as well as Attlee and Bevin. On China in particular, Britain won't achieve the compromise it did - it will either cave in to America, or the "special relationship" will go down. With both Morrison as PM and a more right-wing Cabinet, it's likely we'll try to cling on to India even longer. A civil war will break out, with British troops in the middle of it for an extended period. Whereas the Tories would try to stick things out through a prolongued Indian war, Morrison will probably end up handing the whole thing to the UN to sort out, and India and Pakistan won't be part of the Commonwealth.

On the NHS, Morrison wasn't just a municipal socialist - he was conservative when it came to removing or even undermining existing private providers. It could well, at least in some areas, end up exactly like Medicaid in the US, a means-tested system aimed at ensuring the poorest are able to get healthcare (and generally failing to achieve that aim). Even if local authorities are legally required to ensure health services that are free to everyone at the point of use, this won't be funded by the Treasury, so councils could well be empowered to fund it through insurance rather than the rates (and Tory-run councils will certainly choose to do that). Many hospitals won't be publicly-owned - they will continue to be private providers with the council becoming a commissioning authority (which won't be good). Most importantly, rather than one big battle with the BMA over pay and conditions, it might end up with every local authority having to fight the same fight individually.

All that being said, Morrison was very much the Gordon Brown of his day - a lot of his positions, his attitude to coalition and his disagreements with other members of the Cabinet, were at least partially motivated by his ambition to be leader, in particular the need to undermine any potential rivals. Like Gaitskell, his intransigence over the budget for rearmament in 1951 was really about forcing Bevan to quit and wreck his chances of being leader - and Bevan fell for it. If Morrison actually were leader during the period, his positions might well have been different.
 
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