NOT A pROGRESSIVE COUNTRY:

[D]espite being far longer, the Blair years pale in Labour mythology compared to the one-term post-war administration of Clement Attlee. This, they will tell you, was a radical, reforming leftwing government that changed the face of the country. It's an assessment that is not so much untrue as overly partial.

To listen to some Labourites, the NHS and the welfare state were the epitome of a properly socialist approach to government.  But, as Blair notes, the National Health Service was not the fruit of pure socialism but "grew out of a whole lot of things already happening, being discussed and debated".

It was the Tories who proposed a 'free' and 'comprehensive' health service in their White Paper of 1944 - a point they only recently seem to have got round to emphasising - the difference was not whether a nationwide health service was desirable, but how it should be adminstered and by whom.  And, famously, the report laying the foundation of the modern welfare state was written by a Liberal, William Beveridge. Likewise,  Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison were not socialist firebrands but, to quote Blair again, "very much on the moderate side of politics".

Far from being successful when it was most leftwing, Labour's most feted government reformed in line not just with the desires of its public, but the ideas of other parties (none of which prevented them losing the 1951 election anyway).

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