Aneurin Bevan ( ; Welsh: Ã, [a'n ?? November 15, 1897 - July 6, 1960), often known as Nye Bevan , was a Welsh Labor Party politician who was Minister of Health in the post-Attlee war ministry of 1945 -51. The son of a coal miner, Bevan is a lifelong champion of social justice, the rights of working people and democratic socialism. He is a longtime Member of Parliament (MP), representing Ebbw Vale in South Wales for 31 years. He is one of the main spokesmen of the Labor Party's left wing, and left-wing British thinking in general. His most famous accomplishment came when, as Minister of Health, he spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, which provided free medical care at point-of-need for all Britons, regardless of wealth. He resigned when the government of Attlee decided to transfer funds from the National Insurance Fund to pay for the arms back. The left-wing group inside the party is described as "Bevanite" but he does not control it.
Born in a working-class family in South Wales, Bevan finally emerged as one of the most respected politicians in Wales. In 2004, more than forty years after his death, he was voted first on the list of 100 Welsh Heroes, who have been credited for contributing to the establishment of the welfare state.
Video Aneurin Bevan
Youth
Bevan was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, in the South Wales Valley and on the northern edge of the South Wales coalfield, the son of coal miners David Bevan and Phoebe (nÃÆ' Â © e Prothero), a tailor. Both Bevan's parents are Nonconformist; his father was a Baptist and his mother was a Methodist. One of ten children, Bevan performs poorly in school and his academic performance is so bad that his principal makes him repeat a year. At the age of thirteen, Bevan left school and began work at local Ty-Trist Colliery. David Bevan had been a supporter of the Liberal Party in his youth, but was transformed into socialism by the writings of Robert Blatchford in Clarion and joined the Independent Labor Party.
Aneurin Bevan also joined the Tredegar branch of the South Wales Mining Federation and became a trade unionist: he was the head of his local Miner at the age of nineteen. Bevan became a famous local orator and was seen by his employer, the Tredegar Iron Company, as a troublemaker. The coal mine manager found an excuse to get him fired. However, with the support of the Federation of Miners, the case was judged as one of victimization and the company was forced to reinstate him.
In 1919, he won a scholarship to Central Labor College in London, sponsored by the South Wales Mining Federation. There, he spent two years studying economics, politics, and history. He read Marxism on campus, developing a political view of his left wing. Reading long passages by William Morris, Bevan gradually began to overcome the stuttering he had since he was a child.
Bevan remained at the College until 1921, attending at a time when a number of his colleagues from South Wales, including Jim Griffiths, were also students at the College. However, some historians question how influential the College is to its political development. He does not, apparently, one of the most diligent students, and finds it difficult to follow regular routines, including early risers for breakfast.
Bevan is one of the founding members of the "Query Club" with his brothers Billy and Walter Conway. The club started in 1920 or 1921 and they met at Tredegar. They will collect money every week for every member who needs it. The club intends to decide that the "Tredegar" Company of Iron and Coal is in the city by being a member of an important group in the community.
After returning home in 1921, he discovered that Tredegar Iron & amp; The Coal Company refused to reinstate him. He did not find work until 1924 and his employer, Bedwellty Colliery, closed just ten months later. Bevan then had to bear another year of unemployment. In February 1925, his father died of pneumoconiosis.
In 1926, he found work again, this time as a paid union employee. His wages of £ 5 per week are paid by a local Mining Member member. His new job arrived just in time for him to lead local miners against coal mining companies in what would become a general strike. When the strike began on May 3, 1926, Bevan soon emerged as one of the leaders of South Wales miners. Miners remain on strike for six months. Bevan is largely responsible for the distribution of strike payments in Tredegar and the establishment of the Council of Action, an organization that helps raise money and provide food for miners.
He was a member of the Pondok Hospital Management Committee around 1928 and became chairman in 1929-30.
Maps Aneurin Bevan
Parliament
In 1928, Bevan won a seat in the Monmouthshire County Council. With that success he was elected as a Labor candidate for Ebbw Vale (replacing the sitting MP), and easily seated the seat in the 1929 General Election. In Parliament he soon became a concern as a harsh critic of the people he felt against the worker. Its targets include Conservative Winston Churchill and Liberal David Lloyd George, as well as Ramsay MacDonald and Margaret Bondfield of the Labor Party itself (he is targeting the latter for his reluctance to increase unemployment benefits). He had strong support from his constituency, becoming one of the few unaffected Labor MPs in the 1931 General Election and this support grew through the 1930s and the Great Depression period in Britain.
As soon as he entered parliament, Bevan was briefly interested in Oswald Mosley's argument, becoming one of 17 signatories of Mosley Memorandum in the context of the recurrent economic crisis of the MacDonald government, including the doubling of the unemployment rate. However, in the words of his biographer John Campbell, "he broke with Mosley immediately after Mosley was violated with the Labor Party". This is a symptom of his lifelong commitment to the Labor Party, which is the result of his strong conviction that only a party supported by the British Labor Movement can have a realistic chance of achieving political power for the working class.
He married fellow Socialist MP Jennie Lee in 1934. He was an early supporter of socialists in Spain and visited the country in 1938. In 1936 he joined the new socialist paper council of the Tribune. His upheaval for the united socialist front of all the leftist parties (including the Communist Party of Great Britain) led to his brief expulsion from the Labor Party in March to November 1939 (along with Stafford Cripps and C. P. Trevelyan). However, he was reinstated in November 1939 after agreeing "to refrain from committing or taking part in a campaign that goes against the stated Party policy".
He strongly criticized the British government's weaponry plans in the face of Hitler's German rise, told the Labor conference in the fall of 1937:
If the international situation is directly used as an excuse to make us drop our resistance to the government's nuclear weapons program, the next step is that we must stop from any industrial or political action that could disrupt national unity in the face of the fascists. aggression. Along the way there are endless streets, and at the end a totalitarian state volunteers with us setting up barbed wire. You can not collaborate, you can not accept collaboration logic on first class issues like re-armament, and at the same time avoid the implications of collaboration along the lines when the opportunity demands it.
But the Labor conference chose to drop its opposition to re-weaponry. When Winston Churchill said that the Labor Party had to refrain from giving Hitler the impression that Britain was divided, Bevan rejected this as "evil": "The fear of Hitler will be used to scare the British workers into silence." In short Hitler is to rule England by proxy.If we accept the opinion that the common enemy is Hitler and not the British capitalist class, then of course Churchill is right, but that means ignoring the class struggle and the submissive attitude of the British workers to their own masters. "
However, in March 1938, Bevan wrote in the Tribune that Churchill's warning about Germany's intentions for Czechoslovakia was "a uniqueness of magnificent harmony" compared to the "thin and lethargic droplets" of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Bevan is now called unsuccessful for the Popular Front against fascism under the leadership of the Labor Party, including anti-fascist Tories. On March 31, 1939, Bevan was expelled from the Labor Party along with several others to share the platform with organizations not affiliated with Labor in an attempt to find the Popular Front.
When the government introduced a voluntary national service in December 1938, Bevan argued that the Labor Party should demand the nationalization of the arms industry, support the Spanish Republic and sign the Anglo-Soviet pact in return for its support. When the Labor Party supported the government scheme without such conditions, Bevan criticized Labor for pleading people to recruit platforms to put themselves under the leadership of their opponents. When compulsory military service was introduced six months later, Bevan joined other Labor members against him, calling it "a complete abandonment of the hopes of a successful struggle against the weight of wealth in Great Britain". The government has no argument to persuade the youth to go to war "except in other disreputable efforts to defend themselves against the redistribution of international swags".
In August 1939 came the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In Parliament Bevan argues that this is the logical outcome of the government's foreign policy. But at the time of this national crisis he chose for the first time with the government. He wants war not just a war against fascism but a war for socialism.
He is a strong critic of Chamberlain's policy, arguing that his old foe, Winston Churchill, should be empowered. During the war he was one of the leftist leaders of the Commons, against the wartime Coalition government. Bevan opposed the heavy censorship imposed on radio and newspapers as well as the Wartime Defense Rule of Defense, which gave the Secretary of the Interior powers to foreign nationals without trial. Bevan called for the nationalization of the coal industry and advocated the opening of the Second Front in Western Europe to assist the Soviet Union in its struggle with Germany. Churchill responded by calling Bevan "an annoying nuisance".
Bevan was critical of the British Army leadership that he felt class-bound and inflexible. After Ritchie's retreat in Cyrenaica in early 1942 and his disastrous defeat by Rommel at Gazala, Bevan made one of his most memorable speeches in the Commons to support the censure movement against the Churchill administration. In this case he said, "The Prime Minister must realize that in this country there is a mockery on the lips of everyone that if Rommel was in the British Army he would remain a sergeant... There was a man in the British Army who threw 150,000 people across Ebro in Spain, Michael Dunbar.She is now a sergeant... He is the Chief of Staff in Spain, he won the Battle of Ebro, and he is a sergeant. "In fact, Dunbar was recommended to get a commission, but rejected it himself.
Bevan believes that the Second World War will give Britain an opportunity to create a "new society". He often cites an 1855 section of Karl Marx: "The redeeming feature of war is that it places a nation to be tested.As atmospheric exposure reduces all mummies for instant dissolution, so war passes the highest judgment on social systems that have long lived their life force. " At the start of the 1945 election campaign, Bevan told his audience that his goal was to remove any resistance to the Labor program: "We have become dreamers, we have become sufferers, now we are builders We enter this campaign in this election, not only to get rid of the Tory majority.We want complete political extinction of the Tory Party, and twenty-five years of Labor Government. "
Government
The 1945 general election resulted in a major victory for the Labor Party, giving it a sizable majority to enable the implementation of party manifesto commitments and to introduce a broad-range social reform program collectively dubbed the "Welfare State" (see 1945 Manpower Manpower Manifesto). This reform was achieved in the face of great financial difficulties after the war. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, appoints Aneurin Bevan as Minister of Health, with an authority that also covers Housing. Thus, the responsibility for institutionalizing a new and comprehensive National Health Service, and addressing the country's severe post-war housing shortage, fell to the youngest member of the Attlee Cabinet in its first ministerial position. Free National Health Service is paid directly through public money. Government revenues are increasing for welfare state expenditures by a severe increase in marginal tax rates for wealthy business owners in particular, as part of what the Labor government sees as a redistribution of wealth created by the working class of large industrial owners to workers.
The collective principle states that... no society can legitimately call itself civilized if the sick person is denied medical aid due to lack of means.
On the "appointed day", July 5, 1948, after overcoming the political opposition of the Conservative Party as well as from within his own party, and after a dramatic clash with the British Medical Association, which threatened to derail the earlier National Health Service scheme. even started, as medical practitioners continued to withhold their support just months before the service launch, Bevan's National Health Service Act 1946 came into force. After eighteen months of ongoing disputes between the Ministry of Health and BMA, Bevan finally won the support of most medical professions by offering several small concessions, but without sacrificing the basic principles of his National Health. Service proposal. Bevan then gave the famous quote, to be an intermediary deal, he "stuffed their mouths with gold". About 2,688 volunteer hospitals and towns in England and Wales were nationalized and under the control of Bevan as Minister of Health.
Bevan berkata:
The National Health Service and Welfare State have been used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouth of some people as disgraceful terms. Why this is not so difficult to understand, if you look at everything from a highly individualistic, competitive society. Free health care is pure Socialism and therefore contradicts the hedonism of capitalist society.
When Bevan was appointed minister in 1945, he envisioned the public housing sector that would give the people the choice to live in the work of the owner or the private sector:
We should try to introduce in our modern villages and cities, what is always a beautiful feature of the English and Welsh villages, where doctors, sellers, butchers and farm workers all live on the same street. I believe it is very important for a life full of citizens... to see a living carpet of a mixed community.
Substantial bombing damage and the continued existence of pre-war slum areas in many parts of the country made the task of housing reform extremely challenging for Bevan. Indeed, these factors, exacerbated by post-war restrictions on the availability of building materials and skilled labor, collectively serve to limit Bevan's achievements in this field. 1946 saw the completion of 55,600 new homes; this increased to 139,600 in 1947 and 227,600 in 1948. Although this is not a worthwhile achievement, Bevan's home construction rate is seen as a lesser achievement compared to his Conservative (indirect) successor, Harold Macmillan, who can complete about 300,000 a year as Minister of Housing in the 1950s. Macmillan was able to concentrate full-time in Housing, instead of being obliged, like Bevan, to combine his housing portfolio with that for Health (which for Bevan takes a higher priority).
Bevan argued that his Welsh mining constituents did not send him to Parliament to "dress up" and refused to wear formal attire at Buckingham court.
Bevan told the party rally in 1948: "That is why there is no amount of cambol, and no attempt on ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart the deep hatred of the Tory Party that caused the bitter experience to me. worried they were lower than pests, they condemned millions of first-graders to semi-starvation. "The commentary inspired the creation of the Vermin Club by angry Conservatives; they attacked Bevan for years for metaphors. The vice-chairman of the Labor Party Herbert Morrison complained that Bevan's attacks had backfired, because his words "do more to make Tory work and choose... than the Conservative Central Office can do."
In 1951, with his retirement Ernest Bevin, Bevan was the prime candidate for the Foreign Minister. Prime Minister Attlee rejected Bevan because he did not believe in his personality. According to John Campbell, Attlee thinks that:
- Bevan's reckless temperament, uncharacteristic tone and reputation as an extreme left wing combined to make the Foreign Office seem the last place the wise Prime Minister would think of placing it at any time. His "pest" speech still resonates; trembling imagination at the repetition on the international stage.
Bevan was appointed Minister of Labor (where he helped to secure a deal for railroad workers who gave them a large raise)) in 1951 but soon resigned in protest at the recognition of the cost of dental and eyeglass prescriptions - made by Hugh Gaitskell - 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 resignation speech April 23, 1951. Later in the same year, Labor was defeated in the general election.
After Bevan left the Health Ministry in 1951, he could never reach his level of success. For all his intelligence and intelligence, Bevan proved to be a difficult and hostile counterpart to the Labor leaders, using his powerful political base as a weapon. Kenneth O. Morgan said, "Bevan himself continues to fly the flag of left-wing socialism - which gives him unparalleled authority amongst voting parties and in party conferences."
Opposition
The last decade Bevan saw his political position weaken year by year because he failed to find a winning problem that would capitalize on his skills.
In 1952 Bevan published In Place of Fear, the most widely read socialist book of that period, according to a critically acclaimed right-wing lawmaker, Anthony Crosland. According to The Times Literary Supplement, the book is "dithyramb with twists and turns to many sides of Mr. Bevan's personal and public experience." Bevan started: "A young miner in the coal mine of South Wales, my concern is with one practical question: Where is the power lies in this British state, and how can it be achieved by the workers?"
In March 1952, a poorly prepared Bevan came from worse in a Commons comeback debate on health with Conservative backbencher Iain Macleod: Macleod's performance led Churchill to appoint him Minister of Health about six weeks after his debate with Bevan.
Outside the office, Bevan immediately exacerbated the divisions within the Labor Party between right and left. For the next five years, Bevan was the leader of the Labor Party's left wing, known as the Bevanites. They criticized high defense spending (mainly for nuclear weapons), called for better relations with the Soviet Union, and opposed party leader, Attlee, on most issues. According to Richard Crossman, Bevan hates "the battle you have to do in politics.... He is not fit to be a leader, he is cut down into a prophet." In 1954, Gaitskell defeated Bevan in a hard-fought contest to become Labor Party's treasurer. In March 1955, when Britain was preparing for its first hydrogen bomb test, Bevan led an uprising of 57 Labor MPs and abstained on a key vote. The Parliament Labor Party voted 141 to 113 to withdraw the whip from it, but was restored within a month due to its popularity.
After the 1955 election, Attlee retired as a leader. Bevan fought for leadership against Morrison and right-wing worker Hugh Gaitskell, but Gaitskell emerged victorious. Bevan's remark that "I know the right political leader for the Labor Party is a kind of unused counting machine" is considered to refer to Gaitskell, although Bevan denies it (commenting on Gaitskell's notes as Chancellor of the Minister of Finance as "proven"). However, Gaitskell was ready to create the Bevan Shadow Colonial Secretary, and then the Shadow Foreign Secretary in 1956. Bevan was as critical of the hostage of Colonel Nasser of the Suez Canal by the Egyptians on July 26, 1956 because he was the next Anglo-French military officer.. He compared Nasser with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. He was a vocal critic of the Conservative government's actions in the Suez Crisis, actually delivering important speeches at Trafalgar Square on 4 November 1956 at a rally, and criticizing the government's actions and arguments in the Commons on 5 December 1956. At Trafalgar rally, Bevan accused the government of "bankruptcy and despair policy". Bevan stated at Trafalgar's meeting:
We are stronger than Egypt but there are other countries that are stronger than us. Are we prepared to accept for ourselves the logic we apply in Egypt? If the stronger states of ourselves accept the absence of principles, the anarchist attitude of Eden and the launching of bombs in London, what answer do we get, what complaints do we get? If we will appeal to strength, if strength is to be the referee we propose, it would at least make sense to try to make sure we get it first, even if you accept that bad logic, it's a decadent point of view.
We are actually in today's position having appealed to force in the case of a small country, where if it was submitted to our fight it would lead to the destruction of Great Britain, not only as a nation, but as an island containing men and women alive. Therefore I told Anthony, I told the British government, there is no count at all where they can be maintained.
They have defamed the English name. They have embarrassed us for the things we were once proud of. They have been offended by every principle of decency and there is only one way in which they can even begin to restore their tarnished reputation and that is out! Exit! Exit!
That year, he was finally elected as party treasurer, defeating George Brown.
Bevan worries many of his supporters when he suddenly reverses his resistance to nuclear weapons. Speaking at the 1957 Labor conference, he denounced unilateral nuclear disarmament, saying "This will send a British Foreign Secretary naked to the conference room". This statement is often misunderstood: Bevan argues that unilateralism will lead to the loss of British allies, and one interpretation of his metaphor is that nudity will come from the lack of allies, not the lack of weapons. According to Paul Routledge journalist Donald Bruce, a former MP and Private Parliamentary Secretary and adviser to Bevan, has told him that Bevan's shift to disarmament issues was the result of discussions with the Soviet government in which they advised him to encourage British retention of nuclear weapons so they can be used as a bargaining tool in negotiations with the United States.
In 1957, Bevan, Richard Crossman and General Secretary of the Labor Party Morgan Phillips sued the magazine The Spectator for defamation, after one of his authors described them as liquor during the Italian Socialist Party conference. The article writes that three men:
... confusing the Italians with their capacity to fill themselves like tanks with whiskey and coffee... Though the Italians were never convinced that the English delegates were aware, they always connected them with great political intelligence.
All three won their case, and collected the compensation money: later, however, Crossman had to admit that they had falsely sworn to do so.
In 1959, Bevan was elected as Deputy Leader of the Labor Party. In pain, he went to the hospital at the end of 1959 to undergo surgery for an ulcer, but a malignant stomach cancer was found instead. Bevan died in his sleep at 4.10 pm on July 6, 1960, at the age of 62 at his home Asheridge Farm, Chesham, Buckinghamshire. His body was cremated at the Gwent Crematorium in Croesyceiliog.
His last speech at the House of Commons, in the Nov. 3, 1959 Debate on the Queen's Speech, refers to the difficulty of persuading voters to support policies that will make them less capable in the short term but more prosperous in the long run.
Bibliography publication
- Why Not Trust The Tories? , 1944. Is published under the pseudonym 'Celticus'. The title is meant ironically.
- In Place of Fear , 1952. (ISBN: 9781163810118)
- Excerpts from Bevan's speech are included in the work of Greg Rosen Old Work to New , Methuen, 2005.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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