Aneurin Bevan

British politician

• Born: November 15, 1897
• Birthplace: Tredegar, Monmouthshire, Wales
• Died: July 6, 1960
• Place of death: Chesham, Buckinghamshire, England

Bevan was the most eloquent British spokesperson of his time for democratic socialism and also the architect of the National Health Service, one of the most important social reforms of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Aneurin Bevan (eh-NI-rehn BEHV-ahn) was the son of a coal miner and began work in the mines at the age of thirteen. Bevan overcame a childhood speech impediment and by his late teens was an effective speaker and aspiring leader. In 1919, he won a scholarship from the South Wales Miners to study for two years at the Central London Labour College, a school that specialized in Marxist economics and working-class history. He returned to Tredegar in 1921, held posts in local government and in his miners’ lodge, and was elected in 1929 to the House of Commons as the Labour Party candidate for his local constituency, Ebbw Vale. In 1934, he married Jennie Lee, a Labour member of Parliament, who was to be one of his closest political associates.

Bevan was a great platform orator and parliamentary debater, soon recognized as the equal of both David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Bevan had been a voracious reader since childhood, and his speaking style was both literate and popular. He soon became a spokesperson for the left wing of his party and was often critical of his own leaders. Bevan wrote frequently for the socialist weekly Tribune, which he edited from 1940 to 1945 when he engaged the then little-known George Orwell as literary editor. Bevan was a Marxist, but his Marxism was flexible and imaginative, never sectarian and dogmatic. It was a mode of viewing reality, not a finished philosophical system. Bevan believed in class struggle, but it was class struggle to be waged through election battles. He believed that the greatest weapon the working class had was the vote, but it had yet to learn to use it properly. He often spoke in anger when describing the sufferings of workers and especially the suffering of his own South Wales miners, but he was not the dour, spite-ridden man depicted by his enemies. He was ebullient and zestful, large in body and in human interests, with friends from many areas of life. He loved good food, clothes, theater, literature, and exhilarating conversation.

Life’s Work

Throughout the 1930’s, Bevan attacked the national (predominantly Conservative) governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain for working much harder to cut payments to the unemployed than they did to end unemployment, the miseries of which Bevan and members of his family had endured during much of the 1920’s. Bevan also attacked Baldwin and especially Chamberlain for their appeasement of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He criticized his own leaders for failing to rally more support for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. He joined with Sir Richard Stafford Cripps (who was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1947) and others in a desperate and unrealistic campaign to create a popular or united front of the Labour Party, Communists, Liberals, and even dissident Conservatives to drive Chamberlain from office. The campaign succeeded only in provoking the Labour Party, which had forbidden its members to cooperate with Communists, to expel both Bevan and Cripps in March, 1939. Bevan now had a reputation as an incorrigible party rebel.

In September, 1939, Chamberlain reluctantly led Great Britain into war. In December, Bevan was readmitted into his party. In May, 1940, Churchill replaced the ineffective Chamberlain and invited Labour to enter a new National Coalition Government. Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, became deputy prime minister; Herbert Morrison became home secretary; and Ernest Bevin, minister of labour. Bevan continued in the role of critic. He called for the early opening of a second front in Europe through a cross-channel invasion. He attacked Churchill for trying to save the monarchies of Italy and Greece and for using troops against the Greek Left. He did not spare his own leaders. He opposed Morrison for censoring newspapers and Bevin for his harsh measures against unofficial strikes. For a time, Bevan was in danger of being expelled again.

In July, 1945, Labour won an overwhelming election victory, and Attlee, now prime minister, made Bevan minister of health and housing. Bevan built more than one million housing units, mainly rental council housing (public housing), but was never given the resources for the more ambitious program he advocated. His main job, however, was to convert the very limited National Health Insurance program, introduced by Lloyd George before World War I, into something more comprehensive, more generous, and more socialist. The old program paid some medical bills for some of the working class; the new National Health Services Bill that Bevan introduced in 1946 covered all medical costs for everyone in Great Britain. The old program was administered in part by private insurance companies; the new program was to be run by a government ministry and to be financed by general taxation. The bill also abolished the purchase of private practices and took over municipal and private hospitals. Private practice, however, was not abolished, and entry into the system was voluntary for both patients and doctors. Bevan hoped to make the service so attractive that few would stay outside it. He did not create, as many doctors feared he might, a full-time state-salaried service but paid doctors through a combination of a small basic salary and capitation fees for every enrolled patient. Despite his many compromises and concessions, the leaders of the British Medical Association assaulted him as a führer who sought to set up a medical dictatorship. They organized a campaign to boycott the service and prevent it from even opening. Bevan, displaying great confidence and dispensing a few additional concessions, outflanked and outmaneuvered the medical opposition and triumphantly opened the service as planned on July 5, 1948. In a few months, 90 percent of the doctors and 97 percent of the population had signed on.

This was one of the last of the Labour victories. The government, which had nationalized many industries and extended the social services, now began a policy of consolidating rather than extending socialist policies. Bevan objected, but he lost. The Conservative opposition and the press depicted him as a raving, embittered proponent of class war; a frustrated Bevan sometimes helped them with angry words, the most notorious being his description of the Tory Party as “lower than vermin.” In February, 1950, Labour won reelection but with a very small parliamentary majority. In January, 1951, Bevan became minister of labour. The government, meanwhile, under pressure from the United States, had decided to increase military spending by œ4.7 billion over the next three years to counter any possible moves by the Soviet Union in Europe. Bevan argued that the increase was totally unnecessary and would, moreover, because of shortages in raw materials and machine tools, be impossible to carry out. Hugh Gaitskell, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer and a professional economist, assured the cabinet that the program was feasible, provided that cuts were made in the social services, including the imposition of partial payments for eyeglasses and false teeth. For Bevan, a totally free medical service had become a basic socialist principle. He and two colleagues resigned from the government.

In October, 1951, a divided Labour Party lost a very close election. The conservative Labourites blamed Bevan. Bevan blamed the loss on the economic stringencies introduced to finance the new military spending, much of which the new Conservative government soon canceled as impossible to implement, just as Bevan had predicted. War broke out within the Labour Party. Bevan attacked his leaders for weakening their commitment to nationalization of industry, for ceasing to defend the extension of social welfare, and, above all, for following the United States in a rigid policy of confronting the Soviets everywhere. Bevan, in turn, was blasted as an apologist for the Soviet Union and a hater of the United States. Bevan did not admire the Soviet Union, but he did not believe it posed a military threat to the West. From 1951 to 1956, “Bevanism,” a very loosely organized movement of the Left within the Labour Party, challenged the leadership. Bevan and the Bevanites won the solid backing of the constituency sections of the party (the individual membership groups) but were defeated in the parliamentary party and were rejected by the leaders of the largest trade unions, who controlled the bloc vote at the party conferences and provided much of the party money. Bevan had won the party activists but not the party machine. In 1955, he was briefly expelled from the parliamentary party and narrowly missed expulsion from the party itself. Shortly thereafter, Labour lost its second straight election and Gaitskell, by a large margin, defeated Bevan in the election for party leader.

Peace slowly returned to the Labour Party in 1956. Bevan realized that he could not oust Gaitskell as leader, and Gaitskell realized that he could not drive Bevan from the party. The two antagonists cooperated in November, 1956, in opposing Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s invasion of the Suez Canal zone. In December, Gaitskell accepted Bevan as the party spokesperson on foreign affairs and shadow foreign minister. At the party conference in October in the following year, Bevan disappointed many of his former followers by delivering a powerful speech opposing unilateral nuclear disarmament. Bevan had often attacked the heavy reliance of NATO on nuclear weapons, but he wanted negotiation. Unilateral disarmament, he argued, would tear up the fabric of international relationships already created. It was “an emotional spasm” that would send a future British foreign secretary “naked into the conference chamber.”

In October, 1959, Labour lost its third general election in a row. A few days later, Bevan became deputy leader of the party. He now was in title what he had been in reality for the past two years, the number two man in the party, virtually coleader with Gaitskell. In the same month at a party conference, Bevan gave his last important speech, an exposition of socialist values and a defense of public ownership as necessary to achieve them. A month later, Bevan underwent an operation for cancer and died, on July 6, 1960.

Significance

The public abuse that Bevan had so often evoked had already died away several years before his death. The Welsh demagogue, once called by Churchill the “minister of disease,” had been transformed into a statesman of rare gifts. Perhaps Bevan had mellowed, but, more likely, once the postwar radicalism had ebbed, he was no longer dangerous enough to hate. His death brought forth a tidal wave of eulogy. Bevan had only one important governmental achievement, the building of the National Health Service; that was so soundly built, however, that even Margaret Thatcher, who began in 1979 to demolish most of the works of the 1945 Labour government, was not able to do it much damage. About 90 percent of the British population used the service. Bevan wrote only one book, In Place of Fear, published in 1952, a short but eloquent statement of the case for democratic socialism. Bevan had many political disappointments. His life seems incomplete and his vision was never realized, but for British socialists, even in beleaguered times, he remains one of the major prophets.

Bibliography

Beckett, Clare, and Francis Beckett. Bevan. London: Haus, 2004. A concise but adequate overview of Bevan’s life and career.

Campbell, John. Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. The title proclaims the thesis. A provocative and well-researched book that presents Bevan as a talented individual preaching an outmoded doctrine.

Eckstein, Harry. The English Health Service: Its Origins, Structure, and Achievements. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. A standard study of the creation of the National Health Service that depicts Bevan as legislator, administrator, and negotiator.

Foot, Michael. Aneurin Bevan: A Biography. Vol. 1. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1962. Vol. 2. London: Davis-Poynter Limited, 1973. A comprehensive and full-scale biography of more than 1,150 pages, written by a friend and political associate of Bevan who has represented his constituency since his death. The first volume covers the years 1897-1945, the second, 1945-1960. This is an exciting and sometimes moving work, flawed perhaps by its unfair treatment of Bevan’s adversaries.

Harris, Kenneth. Attlee. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. A good biography of the man who led the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. It contains much information about Bevan as seen by a colleague who worked with him in some difficult situations.

Jenkins, Mark. Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide. Nottingham, England: Spokesman, 1979. An excellent study of the rank-and-file rebellion of the Labour left from about 1951 to 1957, of which Bevan was more often the symbol than the leader.

Morgan, Kenneth O. Labour in Power, 1945-1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. A carefully researched and well-balanced examination of Labour’s most successful government. This presents Bevan in the context of the cabinet and the problems it faced.

Rintala, Marvin. Creating the National Health Service: Aneurin Bevan and the Medical Lords. London: Frank Cass, 2003. Recounts Bevan’s relationships with two members of Parliament: Lord Moran, a physician who helped Bevan set up the National Health Service (NHS), and Thomas Lord Horder, another physician and the NHS’s major medical foe.

Williams, Phillip. Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. Almost eight hundred large and well-researched pages on the life of Hugh Gaitskell, who defeated Bevan in the battle for party leadership. Williams is as much a partisan of Gaitskell as Michael Foot is of Bevan, who appears here first as a dangerous enemy and only near the end as a respected political partner.