Aneurin Bevan

Aneurin Bevan
A statue of Bevan in Cardiff.
Minister of Health
In office 1945–1951
Preceded by	Henry Willink
Succeeded by	Hilary Marquand
Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale
In office 1929–1960
Preceded by	Evan Davies
Succeeded by	Michael Foot
Personal details
Born	(1897-11-15)15 November 1897 Tredegar, Wales
Died	July 6, 1960(1960-07-06) (aged 62)
Political party	Labour

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 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 gave 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

• Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People, OUP, 1987.

• Greg Rosen (ed), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Politicos Publishing, 2001

See also

• Social democracy
• Socialism
• Bevanism
• Blaenau Gwent
• National Health Service
• Trade Union
• 100 Welsh Heroes

External links

• Never Again! Aneurin Bevan, Housing and Harold Hill
• History of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society
• Aneurin Bevan and the foundation of the NHS
• Biography with excerpts
• BBC Biography with Audio clip of speech on NHS