What would you say are the top 3 prime ministers, mine would be :
- Clement Attlee - This is the guy who got the NHS founded and started up, this shit would NEVER happen under a tory led government.
I thank him for making the public health service as in my experience it had made my life easier in acquiring hearing aids more easily than private funded ones.
- Winston Churchill - For getting us through the war years with keeping our morale up as the Nazi menace goose stepped across Europe and tried to take us over.
Now I am aware that Churchill has some flaws of his own, bit of that 40s racism and the bengal famine, but as a Briton there’s a reason why he’s still celebrated as a hero akin to the U.S’s FDR or Charles De Gaulle of France.
- Gordon Brown - So Gordon Brown has the personality of a bowl of a dull bran flakes, but I think personally had some good economic candour and few scandals (At least from what I’ve seen).
The gentleman might have not been quirky or villainous or most modern PMs but he certainly showed to be somewhat effective steering the nation.
And that is my top 3, what are your picks lads and ladies?
(Keir doesn’t count, he’s really done anything yet)
I don’t feel like my political history is good enough to do a proper tier list but just wanna say I agree with you about Gordon Brown. He’s always seemed very earnest, genuine and compassionate.
Brown was what a PM we really should have nowadays, boring but efficient, the man himself is nice but I mean from a media-scandal-quirkiness perspective.
He’s almost like a UK version of Jimmy Carter from the states where he seemed to be a decent guy but somehow managed to alienate a large section of the public.
Keir doesn’t count, he’s really done anything yet)
In only six and a half weeks from now, you can fairly compare Keir’s effectiveness against that of Liz Truss.
“One truss on from his historic landslide, what is Keir Starmer’s legacy?”
I’m all for making “a truss” a term for “a period of seven weeks”, or “a bit less than two months”.
I fear I don’t have a lot of sway with the dictionary people, though.
I guess I’ll just start using it occasionally :)
I’m 53. Amd such a list would honestly be the 3 least worst PMs.
I remember thatcher winning very clearly. Although at 9. I really had little understanding of her politics. I remember a girl in my class celebrating. I assume more due to her parents opinions and the whole first female thing. But Kim may have been more mature politically then me at that time.
Since then I def have not had any positive role models for PMs. Blair was the closest everyone had to inspiring. And while my economic ideals matched his. I found the fear of loss of the left wing more worrying. The idea that no left opposition even back in 97. Worried me that the politics of the UK would head right.
And honestly no winner has inspired me since that time.
I spose Lizz truss inspired me to think the right wing leaders voting that fucking idiot may finally be the end. But honestly it still took a right of centre leader to gain public support. And the opposition if further right wing. While the most left Green and SNP have little or no real input into our process. So again nothing really forcing future governments to centralise let alone move left.
As a massive partisan of the Labour party, I’m inclined to pick the three Labour PMs prior to Starmer (who, as you say, hasn’t done anything yet), who won majorities: Attlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair.
However! That would be silly, even for me.
So:
- Attlee - you’re right, he was the greatest, especially if we include his pre-PM career as deputy to your second-greatest!
- David Lloyd George - finished off the First World War, enacted the People’s Budget, extended suffrage to women, first major programme of council housing, more education - loads of good stuff.
- Earl Grey - for the Great Reform Act, which was a necessary precondition to Britain becoming a modern democracy
I’ll also offer a friendly critique of your other selections:
- Churchill: judged on his War Ministry alone, I’d agree. But he was also PM later, and was a bit rubbish.
- Gordon Brown: was the perfect person to lead us through the GFC, but otherwise was fairly inconsequential at the time prior to that when he could’ve made more of a difference. Also, he sold the gold (I’M JOKING, OBVIOUSLY).
Earl Grey - for the Great Reform Act, which was a necessary precondition to Britain becoming a modern democracy
Also tea. His. Hot.
Gordon Brown: was the perfect person to lead us through the GFC, but otherwise was fairly inconsequential at the time prior to that when he could’ve made more of a difference.
The problem for Brown was that Blair had made a deal with him to step aside and hand over to him but he hung on like grim death, so Brown only got to be PM right at the end of Labour’s run when everything was a mess and there wasn’t much he could do to fix it.
He’s been doing good work advising Starmer on reforms and policies, so some of the things he wanted to do will be getting done now. I think he could be bolder, eg with HoL reform (I aldo acknowledge that nothing short of sortition would make me happy at this point), but it’s better than the alternative.
Brown is a very hot take. He was PM for three years, tell me what you think was his legacy that makes him a top-3 PM?
The main thing you can praise him for was his efforts to manage the financial crisis and the recession that followed - on which I’d say he did a great job. But that comes with the enormous caveat that, having been Chancellor for the previous ten years, he’s one of the people most responsible for Britain being in that position in the first place. He was the cabinet member ultimately responsible for economic policy and banking regulation over the decade in which he permitted a massive property and financial bubble to develop in the UK, all while he pronouncing that he had ended ‘Tory boom and bust’ - and it turns out he believed his own hype.
Labour commentators went to great lengths afterwards to try to blame the crash in the UK on global factors and arcane financial jargon - often hamming up that the initial spark of the crisis was on US sub-prime debt. But that (deliberately) conflates the proximate trigger and the underlying cause. The vast majority of British banks that need bailouts or rescues - Lloyds, HBOS, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, Alliance and Leicester - were bog-standard UK mortgage lenders who had simply lent too much money to people who couldn’t afford to repay them and secured on over-inflated UK property values, funded through unstable wholesale borrowing, and without holding the financial buffers needed to cope with these risks. Brown and his Treasury team should have supported a stronger regulatory approach, and recognised that we were in a massive bubble and acted to deflate it - instead, they were already running a budget deficit at the height of the boom, pouring fuel into the fire, in complete contravention of Keynesian economics - a key reason why the UK public finances were in such a state when the bubble then burst (in contrast to better managed economies like Germany).
Without Brown’s negligence as Chancellor, the crash in Britain would have been less severe, the public finances would have been more resilient going in to the crisis, no austerity, as a result of which probably no Brexit and no Farage skulking around working-class constituencies stirring up resentment…
FWIW - my number three would be David Lloyd George. Between his time as Chancellor and PM, he’s responsible for establishing the state pension, unemployment benefits, the first (pre-NHS) state-funded healthcare provision, progressive taxation, the primacy of the elected Commons over the unelected Lords, and he won the First World War - a dramatically more impressive legacy than someone like Brown.
Disagree with quite a lot of the more authoritarian stuff Brown supported at the time but gained respect for him since then as he’s focused a lot on poverty. Unlike whatever the fuck Blair’s been up to
