
Labour Party
politician
who was the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1959 until his death in 1960. The son of a coal miner, Bevan was a lifelong champion of social justice
and the rights of working people. He was a long-time Member of Parliament
(MP), representing Ebbw Vale for 31 years, and became recognised as one of the leaders of the party’s left wing, and of left-wing British thought generally.
The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.
What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag?
Apparently some fire-eaters to-day have been saying "Never again must we allow ourselves to get into the same condition of military unprepardness, so we are going to build up a vast war machine in this country in order to surround defeated Germany with a sea of peaceful tranquillity..." It looks as though the consequences of defeat will be more desirable than those of victory.
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.
The language of priorities is the religion of socialism.
There is only one hope for mankind — and that is democratic Socialism.
Labour Party
politician
who was the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1959 until his death in 1960. The son of a coal miner, Bevan was a lifelong champion of social justice
and the rights of working people. He was a long-time Member of Parliament
(MP), representing Ebbw Vale for 31 years, and became recognised as one of the leaders of the party’s left wing, and of left-wing British thought generally. His most famous accomplishment came when, as Minister of Health
in the post-war Attlee government, he spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service
, which provides medical care free at point-of-need to all Britons.
Youth
Bevan was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire
, in the South Wales Valleys
and on the northern edge of the South Wales coalfield
, the son of miner
David Bevan and Phoebe née Prothero, a seamstress. 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 age 13, Bevan 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 (Aneurin Bevan) 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 19. Bevan became a well-known local orator and was seen by his employers, the Tredegar Iron & Coal Company, as a revolutionary
. The manager of the colliery found an excuse to get him sacked. But, 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 had since he was a child.
Bevan was one of the founding members of the "Query Club" with his brother Billy and Walter Conway
. The club started in 1920 or 1921 and they met in Tredegar
. They would collect money each week for any member who needed it. The club intended to break the hold that the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company had on the town by becoming members of pivotal groups in the community.
Upon returning home in 1921, he found that the Tredegar Iron & Coal Company refused to re-hire him. He did not find work until 1924 and his employer, the Bedwellty
Colliery, closed down only ten months later. Bevan then had to endure another year of unemployment. In February 1925, his 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 strike started on 3 May 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 David 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
and this support grew through the 1930s and the period of the Great Depression in the United Kingdom
.
Soon 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.
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 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 C.P. Trevelyan
). But, 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 newspaper
s 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 "... a squalid nuisance".
Bevan was also critical of the leadership of the British Army which he felt was class bound and inflexible. After Auchinleck's defeat by Rommel and his disastrous retreat across Cyrenaica
in 1942, Bevan made one of his most memorable speeches in the Commons in support of a motion of censure against the Churchill government. In this he said, "The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt on everyone's lips that if Rommel had been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant...There is a man in the British Army who flung 150,000 men across the Ebro in Spain, Michael Dunbar
. He is at present a sergeant...He was Chief of Staff in Spain, he won the Battle of the Ebro, and he is a sergeant." How angry this criticism made Churchill can be seen from the following. Churchill devotes almost an entire page in his history "The Second World War" to a lengthy quotation of this speech, yet he never mentions Bevan as the speaker, referring to him only as, "One Member."
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."
After World War II, when the Communists took control of China, Parliament debated the merits of recognising the Communist government. Churchill, no friend of Bevan or Mao Zedong
, commented that recognition would be advantageous to the United Kingdom for various reasons and added, "Just because you recognise someone does not mean you like him. We all, for example, recognise the Right Honourable Member from Ebbw Vale."
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 manifestocommitments and to introduce a programme of far-reaching social reforms that were collectively dubbed the 'Welfare State' (see 1945 Labour Election Manifesto). These reforms were achieved in the face of great financial difficulty following the war. 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 public money. Government income was increased for the Welfare state expenditure by a severe increase in marginal tax rates for wealthy business owners in particular, as part of what the Labour government largely saw as the redistribution of the wealth created by the working class from the owners of large-scale industry to the workers.
On the "appointed day", 5 July 1948, having overcome political opposition from both the Conservative Party and from within his own party, and after a dramatic showdown 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 18 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 hospital
s in England and Wales were nationalised and came under Bevan's supervisory control as Health Minister.
Bevan said:

Bevan was appointed Minister of Labour
(during which he helped to secure a deal for railwaymen which provided them with a big pay increase) 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 by the Korean War
. Two other Ministers, John Freeman and Harold Wilson
resigned at the same time. See Bevan's speeches Later the same year, the Labour party lost power in a general election.
Opposition
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 March 1952, a poorly prepared (and possibly inebriated) Bevan came off the worse in an evening Commons debate on health with Conservative backbencher Iain Macleod
: Macleod's performance led Churchill to appoint him Minister of Health some six weeks after his debate with Bevan.
Out of office, 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
. In 1954, Gaitskell beat Bevan in a hard fought contest to be the Treasurer of the Labour Party
. 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, but it was restored within a month due to his popularity.
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 government's actions in the Suez Crisis
, noticeably delivering high profile speeches in Trafalgar 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. At the Trafalgar rally, Bevan accused the government of a "policy of bankrupcty and despair"”. Bevan stated at the Trafalgar rally:
"We are stronger than Egypt but there are other countries stronger than us. Are we prepared to accept for ourselves the logic we are applying to Egypt? If nations more powerful than ourselves accept the absence of principle, the anarchistic attitude of Eden and launch bombs on London, what answer have we got, what complaint have we got? If we are going to appeal to force, if force is to be the arbiter to which we appeal, it would at least make common sense to try to make sure beforehand that we have got it, even if you accept that abysmal logic, that decadent point of view.That year, he was finally elected as party treasurer, beating George Brown
We are in fact in the position today of having appealed to force in the case of a small nation, where if it is appealed to against us it will result in the destruction of Great Britain, not only as a nation, but as an island containing living men and women. Therefore I say to Anthony, I say to the British government, there is no count at all upon which they can be defended.
They have besmirched the name of Britain. They have made us ashamed of the things of which formerly we were proud. They have offended against every principle of decency and there is only way in which they can even begin to restore their tarnished reputation and that is to get out! Get out! Get out!"
.
In 1957, Bevan joined Richard Crossman
and Morgan Phillips
in a controversial lawsuit for libel against The Spectator
magazine, which had described the men as drinking heavily during a socialist conference in Italy. Having sworn that the charges were untrue, the three collected damages from the magazine. Many years later, Crossman's posthumously published diaries confirmed the truth of The Spectator's charges.
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, and one interpretation of his metaphor is that nakedness would come from the lack of allies, not the lack of weapons. According to the journalist Paul Routledge, Donald Bruce
, a former MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary
and adviser to Bevan, had told him that Bevan's shift on the disarmament issue was the result of discussions with the Soviet government where they advised him to push for British retention of nuclear weapons so they could possibly be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the United States.
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 following year at the age of 62 at his home Asheridge Farm, Chesham
, Buckinghamshire
. His remains were cremated at Gwent Crematorium in Croesyceiliog
.
His last speech in the House of Commons, in the Debate of the 3 November 1959 on the Queen's Speech, 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 40 years after his death, he was voted first in a list of 100 Welsh Heroes
, this being credited much to his contribution to the Welfare State
after World War Two.
See also
- Social democracySocial democracySocial democracy is a political ideology of the center-left on the political spectrum. Social democracy is officially a form of evolutionary reformist socialism. It supports class collaboration as the course to achieve socialism...
- Democratic socialismDemocratic socialismDemocratic socialism is a description used by various socialist movements and organizations to emphasize the democratic character of their political orientation...
- BevanismBevanismBevanism was the ideological argument for the Bevanites, a movement on the Left wing of the Labour Party in the late 1950s and led by Nye Bevan. They were opposed by the Gaitskellites, who are variously described as Centre-left, Social Democrats, or 'moderates' within the Party.Bevanism was...
- Blaenau GwentBlaenau GwentBlaenau Gwent is a county borough in South Wales, sharing its name with a parliamentary constituency. It borders the unitary authority areas of Monmouthshire and Torfaen to the east, Caerphilly to the west and Powys to the north. Its main towns are Abertillery, Brynmawr, Ebbw Vale and...
- National Health ServiceNational Health ServiceThe National Health Service is the shared name of three of the four publicly funded healthcare systems in the United Kingdom. They provide a comprehensive range of health services, the vast majority of which are free at the point of use to residents of the United Kingdom...
- Trade UnionTrade unionA trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
- 100 Welsh Heroes100 Welsh Heroes100 Welsh Heroes was an opinion poll run in Wales as a response to the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons poll of 2002. The Welsh poll was carried out mainly on the internet, starting on 8 September 2003 and finishing on 23 February 2004...
Bibliographic publications
- Why Not Trust The Tories?, 1944. Published under the pseudonym, 'Celticus'. The title was intended ironically.
- In Place of Fear, 1952. (ISBN 9781163810118)
- 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 bibliographic 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
- G D H Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L F Easterbrook, Ait William Beveridge, and Harold J Laski, Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society(Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
External links
- Never Again! Aneurin Bevan, Housing and Harold Hill
- http://www.cradleofnhs.org.uk/medical.htmHistory of the Tredegar Medical Aid SocietyTredegar Medical Aid SocietyTredegar Medical Aid Society was founded in Tredegar in South Wales. In return for a contribution from its members it supplied free health care. This society contributed the model which established the British National Health Service...
] - Aneurin Bevan and the foundation of the NHS
- Biography with excerpts
- BBC Biography with Audio clip of speech on NHS
- Nye Bevan on The Guardian's Greatest Speeches of the 20th Century site, featuring full audio of Bevan's speech at the 4th November 1956 Trafalgar Square rally against British action in Suez.