I was not aware of these other aspects of the famous British Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, but they’ve surfaced again as a result of the current British Labour government calling in some of the military to help clean up Birmingham’s terrible rubbish crisis (H/T, Samizdata).
First up, the current crisis, which has been self-inflicted:
Angela Rayner has called in the Army to tackle the Birmingham bin crisis. The Local Government Secretary has used formal powers known as Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (Maca) to summon Army experts after a strike by bin workers, which has lasted over a month, left more than 17,000 tons of waste rotting in the streets.
It is understood a small number of military personnel with operational planning expertise are offering logistical support to tackle the crisis. Sources said there were contingency plans in place to scale up the number of soldiers involved if necessary.
I say self-inflicted because although it’s not the current government’s fault it is their side since Lefty lawyers won an equal-pay claim precedent years ago which has now bankrupted Birmingham City Council (£760 million unpaid bill on equal pay), and the Unite Union is now on strike against the Council as the latter tries to screw their jobs and their pay – and of course the rubbish workforce is almost entirely male (like linemen, plumbers, sewerage workers,…..),
Anyhoo, the real point of the post is the link with the past:
The London dock strike of July 1949, led by Communists, was suppressed when the Attlee Government sent in 13,000 Army troops and passed special legislation to promptly end the strike. His response reveals Attlee’s growing concern that Soviet expansionism, supported by the British Communist Party, was a genuine threat to national security, and that the docks were highly vulnerable to sabotage ordered by Moscow. He noted that the strike was caused not by local grievances, but to help communist unions who were on strike in Canada. Attlee agreed with MI5 that he faced “a very present menace”.
But also this…
[The Left’s] hymns of praise to Attlee usually leave out the verse about him using the army to break a strike, and always omit the one about him being the father of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.
Back when Labour people and Social Democrats hated communists.
No Minister 
Welll if the communists wanted to subvert the British Maritime industry they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
In Atlee’s time Great Britain had the largest merchant fleet in the world and was the worlds greatest ship builder
These things are not true today and the greatest damage to them occurred under Thatcher’s watch.
Meaning, according to this post’s logic Margaret Thatcher was a communist!
Your argument fails on this point…
…. and the greatest damage to them occurred under Thatcher’s watch.
Like a lot of other British industry they were already stuffed by the time she turned up (South Korea was the #1 ship builder by then) and her point was that she wasn’t going to keep alive any commercial industry that couldn’t survive by itself.
And while the Soviets in the 1940’s might have been quite happy to wreck Britain’s navy I’m sure they wanted a communist government to merely take over the maritime fleet and the shipbuilding yards, not wreck them.
Moreover, the logic of the post, taking into account your argument, is that Thatcher supporters (like me) still support that argument and those decisions – rather than hiding it away as the British Left does with Attlee’s strike-breaking and support for British nuclear weapons.
He was also the second to last man off the Gallipoli Beaches and Dennis Healey, later Chancellor was a Beach master at Anzio.