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)
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.