Newspaper Article

Saturday Review: books: Tighten your belts: Penny-pincher or saint? Ben Pimlott assesses Stafford Cripps

Pimlott, Ben

2002

Overview

Who is New Labour's patron saint? Aficionados claim Attlee, anti- Blairites mutter MacDonald. One name that doesn't get mentioned, but should, is [Stafford Cripps]. Not only does he offer religion and the law, Cripps can lay claim to the title of Britain's leading pragmatist and consensus-builder of the 20th century, who spoke simultaneously for middle England and the dispossessed. A prime minister who is rightly embarrassed to claim the mantle of Nye, and who has airbrushed [Harold Wilson], should surely feel comfortable with Stafford. Cripps could never quite be trusted by Churchill, but he had a unique ability to inspire the faith of others. If the times required a spiritual leader, Cripps was equal to them. [Peter Clarke] argues convincingly that dignity and austerity worked particularly well with the leaders of the Indian subcontinent. In May 1942, Cripps was dispatched to obtain an Indian settlement. His proposals were rejected. However, he earned guarded respect, and began the painful process of convincing Hindu leaders that the British were serious about disengagement, while convincing Muslim leaders that there would be no precipitate British abandonment. Clarke devotes several chapters to India: notably less to the 1945 Attlee administration. Yet it is during this last episode that Cripps came most prominently to public attention, and that his reputation as half holy man and half killjoy, a kind of British Gandhi, finally matured. \"Shiver with Shinwell, Starve with Strachey,\" went the Tory refrain in the government's early days - but that was before \"Austerity Cripps\" took over as chancellor in 1947 and stole the show. As Clarke explains, it was as much style as reality. The key belt-tightening decisions that turned Cripps's chancellorship into the harshest of the century had already been taken by his predecessor. \"Misery\" Cripps was arguably just the messenger. At the same time, he became the first chancellor to turn the principles of Keynesian economics into a policy revolution. Cripps was lucky with the first half his chancellorship, as he appeared to get to grips with the economy, and unlucky with the second, as the position worsened, forcing a massive devaluation in 1949, which he took as a personal defeat. In the following year, illness pushed him out of politics.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Biographies / Books-titles / Clarke, Peter / Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps / Cripps, Stafford / Nonfiction