Aneurin Bevan, usually known as Nye Bevan (November 15, 1897 – July 6, 1960) was a Welsh Labour politician and a
socialist. He was a key figure on the left of the party in the mid-twentieth century and was
the Secretary of State responsible for the formation of the
National Health Service.
Youth
Bevan was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, the son of
miner David Bevan. Both Bevan's parents were Nonconformists: his father was a Baptist and his mother a
Methodist. One of ten children, Bevan did poorly at school and his academic performance was so
bad that his headmaster made him repeat a year. At the age of thirteen Aneurin left school and began working in the local Tytryst
Colliery. David Bevan had been a supporter of the Liberal Party in his youth, but was converted to socialism by the
writings of Robert Blatchford in the Clarion and joined the Independent Labour
Party.
His son also joined the Tredegar branch of the South Wales Miners'
Federation and became a trade union activist: he was head of his local Miners' Lodge
at only nineteen. Bevan became a well-known local orator and was seen by his employers, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company, as a
revolutionary. The manager of the colliery found an excuse to get him sacked. However, with the support of the Miners'
Federation, the case was judged as one of victimisation and the company was forced to re-employ him.
In 1919 he won a scholarship to the Central Labour College in London, sponsored by
the South Wales Miners' Federation. At the college he gained his life-long respect for Karl
Marx. Reciting long passages by William Morris, Bevan gradually began to overcome
the stammer that he had since he was a child.
Upon returning home in 1921 he found that the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company refused to re-hire him. He did not find work
until 1924 in the Bedwellty Colliery, and it closed down after ten months. Bevan had to endure
another year of unemployment and in February 1925, his beloved father died of pneumoconiosis.
In 1926 he found work again, this time as a paid union official. His wage of £5 a week was paid by the members of the local
Miners' Lodge. His new job arrived in time for him to head the local miners against the colliery companies in what would become
the General Strike. When the General Strike started on May 3, 1926, Bevan soon emerged as one of the leaders of the South Wales miners. The miners remained on strike for six
months. Bevan was largely responsible for the distribution of strike pay in Tredegar and the formation of the Council of Action,
an organisation that helped to raise money and provided food for the miners.
He was a member of the Cottage Hospital Management Committee around 1928
and was chairman in 1929/30.
Parliament
In 1928 Bevan won a seat on Monmouthshire County Council. With that success he was picked as the Labour Party candidate for
Ebbw Vale (displacing the sitting MP), and easily held the
seat at the 1929 General Election. In Parliament he soon became
noticed as a harsh critic of those he felt opposed the working man. His targets included the Conservative Winston Churchill and the Liberal Lloyd George, as well as
Ramsay MacDonald and Margaret Bondfield
from his own Labour party (he targeted the latter for her unwillingness to increase unemployment benefits). He had solid support
from his constituency, being one of the few Labour MPs to be unopposed in the 1931 General Election.
Not long after he entered parliament Bevan was briefly attracted to Oswald Mosley's
arguments, in the context of Macdonald's government's incompetent handling of rising unemployment. However, in the words of his
biographer John Campbell, "he breached with Mosley as soon as Mosley breached with the Labour Party". This is symptomatic of his
lifelong commitment to the Labour Party which was a result of his firm belief that
only a Party supported by the British Labour Movement could have a realistic chance of attaining
political power for the working class. Thus, for Bevan, joining Mosley's New Party was not an option. Bevan is said to have predicted that Mosley would end up as a
Fascist.
He married fellow socialist MP Jennie Lee in 1934. He was an
early supporter of the socialists in Spain and visited the country in the 1930s. In 1936 he joined
the board of the new socialist newspaper the Tribune. His agitations for a
united socialist front of all parties of the left (including the Communist
Party of Great Britain) led to his brief expulsion from the Labour Party in March to November 1939 (along with
Stafford Cripps and Trevelyan). However, he was readmitted in November 1939 after
agreeing "to refrain from conducting or taking part in campaigns in opposition to the declared policy of the Party."
He was a strong critic of the policies of Neville Chamberlain, arguing that his
old enemy Winston Churchill should be given power. During the war he was one of the
main leaders of the left in the Commons, opposing the wartime Coalition government. Bevan opposed the heavy censorship imposed on radio and newspapers
and wartime Defence Regulation 18B, which is gaven the Home Secretary the powers
to intern citizens without trial. Bevan called for the nationalisation of the coal
industry and advocated the opening of a Second Front in Western Europe in order to help the Soviet
Union in its fight with Germany. Churchill responded by calling Bevan the "Minister of
Disease".
Bevan believed that the Second World War would give Britain the opportunity to create "a
new society". He often quoted an 1855 passage from Karl Marx: "The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test.
As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that
have outlived their vitality." At the beginning of the 1945 general
election campaign Bevan told his audience: "We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the
builders. We enter this campaign at this general election, not merely to get rid of the Tory majority. We want the complete
political extinction of the Tory Party."
Government
The 1945 General Election proved to be a landslide victory for the Labour Party, giving it a large enough majority to allow
the implementation of the party's manifesto commitments and to introduce a programme of far-reaching social reforms that were
collectively dubbed the 'Welfare State' (see 1945 Labour Election Manifesto). The new Prime Minister, Clement
Attlee, appointed Aneurin Bevan as Minister of Health, with a remit that also covered Housing. Thus, the responsibility
for instituting a new and comprehensive National Health Service, as well as tackling the country's severe post-war housing
shortage, fell to the youngest member of Attlee's Cabinet in his first ministerial position. The free health service was paid for
directly through government income, with no fees paid at the point of delivery. Government income was increased for the Welfare
state expenditure by a severe increase in marginal tax rates for the wealthy business owner in particular, as part of what the
Labour government largly saw as the redistribution of the wealth created by the working class from the owners of large-scale
industry to the workers.[1]
| “ |
The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself
civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means. |
” |
| |
— Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear,
p100
|
On the "appointed day", July 5 1948, having overcome political
opposition from both the Conservative Party and from within his own party, and after a dramatic show down with the
British Medical Association, which had threatened to derail the National
Health Service scheme before it had even begun, as medical practitioners continued to withhold their support just months before
the launch of the service, Bevan's National Health Service Act of 1946 came into force. After eighteen months of ongoing
dispute between the Ministry of Health and the
BMA, Bevan finally managed to win over the support of the vast majority of
the medical profession by offering a couple of minor concessions, but without compromising on the fundamental principles of his
NHS proposals. Bevan later gave the famous quote that, in order to broker the deal, he had "stuffed their mouths with gold". Some
2,688 voluntary and municipal hospitals in England and
Wales were nationalised and came under Bevan's supervisory control as Health Minister.
Bevan said:
| “ |
The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as
interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand,
if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism
and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society. |
” |
| |
— Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear,
p106
|
Substantial bombing damage and the continued existence of pre-war slums in many parts of the country made the task of housing
reform particularly challenging for Bevan. Indeed, these factors, exacerbated by post-war restrictions on the availability of
building materials and skilled labour, collectively served to limit Bevan's achievements in this area. 1946 saw the completion of
55,600 new homes; this rose to 139,600 in 1947, and 227,600 in 1948. While this was not an insignificant achievement, Bevan's
rate of housebuilding was seen as less of an achievement than that of his Conservative (indirect) successor, Harold Macmillan,
who was able to complete some 300,000 a year as Minister for Housing in the 1950s. Significantly, Macmillan was able to
concentrate full-time on Housing, instead of being obliged, like Bevan, to combine his housing portfolio with that for Health
(which for Bevan took the higher priority). However critics said that the cheaper housing built by Macmillan was exactly the poor
standard of housing that Bevan was aiming to replace. Macmillan's policies led to the building of cheap, mass-production high
rise tower blocks, which have been heavily criticised since.
Bevan was appointed Minister of Labour in 1951 but soon resigned in
protest at Hugh Gaitskell's introduction of prescription charges for dental care and
spectacles -- created in order to meet the financial demands imposed on the budget by the Korean
War. Two other Ministers, John Freeman and Harold Wilson resigned at the same time. See Bevan's speeches
In 1952 Bevan published In Place of Fear, "the most widely read socialist book" of the period, according to a highly
critical right-wing Labour MP Anthony Crosland.[2] Bevan begins: "A young miner in a South Wales colliery, my concern was with the
one practical question: Where does power lie in this particular state of Great Britain, and how can it be attained by the
workers?" In 1954, Gaitskell beat Bevan in a hard fought contest to be the Treasurer of the Labour Party.
Backbenches
Out of the Cabinet, Bevan soon initiated a split within the Labour Party between the right and the left. For the next five
years Bevan was the leader of the left-wing of the Labour Party, who became known as Bevanites.
They criticised high defence expenditure (especially for nuclear weapons) and opposed the more reformist stance of
Clement Attlee. When the first British hydrogen
bomb was exploded in 1955, Bevan led a revolt of 57 Labour MPs and abstained on a key vote. The Parliamentary Labour Party
voted 141 to 113 to withdraw the whip from him, although such was his popularity that it had to be restored within a month.
After the 1955 general election, Attlee retired as leader.
Bevan contested the leadership against both Morrison and Labour right-winger
Hugh Gaitskell but it was Gaitskell who emerged victorious. Bevan's remark that "I know
the right kind of political Leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating machine" was assumed to refer to
Gaitskell, although Bevan denied it (commenting upon Gaitskell's record as Chancellor of the Exchequer as having "proved" this). However, Gaitskell was prepared to
make Bevan Shadow Colonial Secretary, and then Shadow Foreign Secretary in 1956. In this position, he was a vocal critic of the
governments actions in the Suez Crisis, noticeably delivering high profile speeches in
Trafalagar Square on 4 November 1956 at a protest rally, and
devastating the government's actions and arguments in the House of Commons on 5 December
1956. That year, he was finally elected as party treasurer, beating George Brown.
Bevan dismayed many of his supporters when, speaking at the 1957 Labour Party conference, he decried unilateral nuclear
disarmament, saying "It would send a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference-chamber". This statement is often
misconstrued. Bevan argued that unilateralism would result in Britain's loss of allies. In Bevan's metaphor, the nakedness comes
from the lack of allies, not the lack of weapons.[citation needed]
A charismatic orator at his best, Bevan in his later years was at times handicapped by excessive drinking. In 1952, he was
humiliated in a Commons debate on health by the up-and-coming young conservative Iain
Macleod - partly because the nimble-witted Macleod had prepared himself far better for the debate, partly because Bevan
entered the debate both complacent and the worse for drink. When, in 1957, Bevan, the Labour Party Secretary Morgan Phillips, and Richard Crossman were described by The
Spectator magazine as having imbibed excessively during a socialist conference in Italy, the three sued successfully for libel
and collected damages. Many years later, though, Crossman's posthumously published diaries confirmed the truth of the magazine's
charges.
In 1959 despite suffering from terminal cancer, Bevan was elected as Deputy Leader of the
Labour Party. He could do little in his new role and died the next year at the age of 62.
His last speech in the House of Commons, in which Bevan referred to the difficulties of persuading the electorate to support a
policy which would make them less well-off in the short term but more prosperous in the long term, was quoted extensively in
subsequent years.
In 2004, over forty years after his death, he was voted first in a list to find 100 Welsh
Heroes, this being credited much to his contribution to the Welfare State after
World War Two.
Notes
- ^ Bevan argues that the percentage of tax from personal incomes rose from 9%
in 1938 to 15% in 1949. But the lowest paid a tax rate of 1%, up from 0.2% in 1938, the middle income brackets paid between 14 -
26%, up from 10-18% in 1938, the highly paid 42%, up from 29%, and the top earners 77%, up from 58% in 1938. In Place of
Fear, p146. If you earned over £800,000 per annum in 2005 money terms, (£10,000 in 1948) you paid 76.7% income tax.
- ^ Crosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism, p52
Publications
- Why Not Trust The Tories?, 1944. Published under the pseudonym, 'Celticus'. The title was intended ironically.
- In Place of Fear, 1952.
- Excerpts from Bevan's speeches are included in Greg Rosen's Old Labour to New, Methuen, 2005.
Bevan's key speeches in the legislative arena are to be found in:
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed) Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volume I, Speeches at Westminster 1929-1944, Manutius
Press, 1996.
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed), Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volume II, Speeches at Westminster 1945-1960,
Manutius Press, 2000.
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed), Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volumes I and II, Speeches at Westminster 1929-1960,
Manutius Press, 2004.
Further reading
The major biographies are the uplifting two volume Aneurin Bevan by Michael Foot
(1962 and 1974) and the more sceptical Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, by John Campbell (1987).
Bevan's widow, Jennie Lee, published My Life with Nye, in 1980.
Shorter biographical essays can be found in:
- Kevin Jefferys (ed), Labour Forces, IB Taurus, 2002.
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed), Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volume I, Speeches at Westminster 1929-1944,
Manutius Press, 1996.
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed), Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volume II, Speeches at Westminster 1945-1960,
Manutius Press, 2000.
- Peter J. Laugharne (ed), Aneurin Bevan - A Parliamentary Odyssey: Volumes I and II, Speeches at Westminster 1929-1960,
Manutius Press, 2004.
- Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People, OUP, 1987.
- Greg Rosen (ed), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Politicos Publishing, 2001
See also
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
External links
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