Foot Aneurin Bevan: A Biography

Volume 2: 1945-1960
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28085-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Michael Foot's two-volume biography of Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britain's greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume II, first published in 1973, begins with Bevan's role in the founding of a comprehensive National Health Service - this while he was also tasked with addressing the country's severe post-war housing shortage. It takes in his 1951 resignation from the cabinet in protest at the introduction of prescription charges, and his subsequent leadership of a 'Bevanite' Labour left; his publication in 1952 of In Place of Fear; his service as Shadow Foreign Secretary during the Suez crisis in 1956; his controversial reversal of opposition to nuclear weapons in 1957; and his death from cancer in 1960.

Michael Foot (1913-2010) was a writer, journalist and politician, leading the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. His numerous books range from the withering polemic Guilty Men (co-written with Peter Howard and Frank Owen) about the hapless appeasers of the 1930s to his magnificent two-volume biography of Aneurin Bevan.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Foot, Michael

Leseproben

2

MINISTER OF HOUSING 1945–1947

A habitat planned so as to form a continuous background to a delicately graded scale of human feelings and values is the prime requisite of a cultivated life.— LEWIS MUMFORD1

IN HIS first big speech in the new Parliament Aneurin Bevan stamped himself as a principal figure in the Government and a principal target of Opposition attack. The occasion was a motion moved from the Tory front bench on 17 October 1945, viewing ‘with grave apprehension the existing shortage of houses in both urban and rural areas’. The new Government could hardly have removed the shortage in ten or eleven weeks; any criticism must lie against others. So Bevan congratulated the Opposition on their courage and public spirit; ‘only a very grave concern for the public weal could have inspired them to put down a motion on a subject so embarrassing to themselves’. Then he surveyed, amid much mockery of his opponents, past housing policies, the prospect for the future and the principles which would guide him.

Several newspapers compared the performance with those of the young Lloyd George in the Liberal Government of 1906. ‘He dominated the House,’ wrote the News of the World political correspondent, ‘not merely by superb oratorical mastery, but by the warmth of his personality and imaginative approach to the dry problems of bricks and mortar.’ ‘Only an Act of Congress can stop him reaching Number 10,’ said another commentator. Not all the tributes were in this strain. Lord Kemsley’s Sunday Times detected ‘revolutionary turbulence’ in Bevan’s reference to speculative builders, and called upon Attlee to impose discipline. ‘A Minister who kicks over the traces in the House is a danger to the Government and a fomenter of trouble for his party in the country.’ Another observer, Harold Nicolson, wondered whether the Labour Party would overcome its inveterate jealousy of younger men. (The average age of the new Cabinet was well over sixty.) What would they do with ‘this young flapper’ still in his forties? Compared with the others he was ‘like an eagle in a hen coop’. Clearly he had made a new impact. ‘If he now builds the houses,’ wrote Hannen Swaffer, ‘he is in direct line for the Premiership. If he does not, he is for the high jump.’

One other observer, as outraged as Lord Kemsley, found these speculations absurd or galling. Winston Churchill had been absent from the Commons on 17 October, but he noted every sentence Bevan had uttered. Almost everything the new Government said or did opened afresh the wound of his electoral defeat. Here was a moment when, as he said, the nation, ‘exhausted and overburdened in a fearful degree’, should have been spared ‘deep-seated organic changes’; instead some members of the Government had raised ‘this great schism of militant Socialism’. Churchill’s rumbling fury was directed against many other Ministers too – only Attlee himself was acquitted of having sought to ‘embitter and inflame our proceedings’ – but when it exploded into the first official Vote of Censure in December, Bevan was marked down as the chief culprit. Cripps, Dalton and Morrison were scoffed at; Bevan was the victim of a full-length Churchillian philippic, ending with the famous words: ‘I say today that unless the right hon. Gentleman changes his policy and methods and moves without the slightest delay, he will be as great a curse to his country in time of peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war.’2

The phrase – ‘a squalid nuisance’ – was gleefully taken up by the Tory newspapers. Subsequent comment on the Bevan-Churchill parliamentary duel endowed it with a haze of grandeur and even chivalry. But in 1945 and the months that followed the focus was sharper and truer. Deliberately from the outset, Churchill made the destruction of Bevan’s reputation a primary purpose of the Tory Opposition. He had many old scores of his own to settle, and to drive a wedge between Bevan and his colleagues, to brand him as an incompetent demagogue, was an obvious Tory tactic. Yet there was something more; a flavour of venom and intensity was added to the assault. Nothing could be further from the truth than that Churchill approached the contest with a touch of an old man’s magnanimity and humour. He believed, and said, that the country was being thrust into ‘party antagonism, as bitter as anything I have seen in my long life of political conflict’.3 He saw Bevan as the evil genius who had conjured this spirit into being. Above all he believed Bevan was vulnerable; if he could be destroyed, the blow to the whole Government might be fatal. Nothing that invective could inflict must be spared to achieve that grand objective. The gibe about the ‘squalid nuisance’ hurt Bevan as it was intended to hurt. From that December debate onwards, he knew, if he had ever doubted it, that he could expect no mercy. Churchill, at rare intervals, would make a faint, gracious acknowledgement of the patriotism of his old Coalition partners. Such courtesies were never shown to, or reciprocated by, Bevan. These two combatants fought with cold steel.

Yet no weapons of debate could settle the outcome of this particular battle; the state of the battlefield – the real nature and scale of the housing problem – would be much more decisive, and here the circumstances favoured Churchill. Bevan was vulnerable; so much was glaringly apparent. The housing shortages caused more anguish and frustration than any other of the nation’s manifold post-war problems; all over the country the need was desperate and every M.P. and every local councillor was being besieged by the endless queue of the homeless. According to Churchill in that December debate, a remedy should not be beyond the compass of goodwill and reasonable organization to achieve. Bevan, he said, had inherited ‘a rich legacy of achievement and preparation’; he had squandered it ‘with a profligacy which has rarely been equalled by a Minister who has still to make a reputation’. One part of that legacy was ‘a highly developed house-building machine and the network of well-equipped manufacturing industries which support it and are almost inextricably interwoven with it’ – by that, Churchill meant Britain’s pre-war building industry which, he inferred, could be speedily reassembled to perform the long-term task. More specifically, Bevan’s predecessor had announced in the spring of 1945 his proposals for providing permanent and temporary houses. All this was set in train; the Coalition had decided to ‘enlist the help of all house building agencies of every kind’; why was Bevan not content to put these beneficent schemes into operation? Instead, ‘swayed by partisan spite and prejudice and by the hope of exploiting these vices to suit his own personal political ambitions’, he had decided to ‘chill and check free-enterprise house-building which had always provided the bulk of the nation’s houses’.4 And let none of Bevan’s colleagues object that unimagined obstacles had suddenly arisen to cumber their path. Had they not all made prophecies at the time of the election? Ernest Bevin had promised ‘five million homes in quick time’. Stafford Cripps had allegedly claimed that ‘housing can be dealt with in a fortnight’. Arthur Greenwood had dismissed the Coalition figures as ‘chicken feed’. Thus Churchill in the censure debate on 6 December 1945, and the Tory benches roared their derisive approval in a style they had never previously been able to capture since the calamity in July. ‘The Minister of Health,’ said Churchill, ‘has already allowed four months of excellent building weather to slip away.’ And so it seemed. At that date fewer than one thousand houses and ten thousand temporary houses had been completed since hostilities ended.

Herbert Morrison, replying to Churchill in the censure debate, skilfully sidestepped the attack on Bevan. (‘Did Herbert rise to the occasion?’ Bevan was asked by Harold Wilson that night. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘he reduced it to his own level and then rode it.’) Bevan himself, taunted Churchill, was not allowed out of ‘his dug-out’ by his comrades. Morrison was frequently interrupted by Lord Winterton, the cantankerous father of the House. ‘Houses. H–O–U–S–E–S,’ cried the noble Lord. ‘I was asking how many houses.’ For the first and last time in his life Lord Winterton spoke for the masses. The same cry mounted all over the country until it appeared that, with little need of aid from Churchill’s diatribes, the new Lloyd George might be overwhelmed in the flood.

It was in this atmosphere that Bevan had to devise a housing policy. So it is necessary to examine the facts: what was the problem of 1945 and what did he do?

*

Churchill’s great pre-war ‘house-building machine’ had one spectacular merit – it did eventually produce houses at the rate of roughly 350,000 a year, an achievement of sheer quantity unexampled either in Britain or anywhere else in the world, and since unfettered private enterprise was primarily responsible, the Tories naturally boasted about it. Yet the figures by themselves conceal features of the situation which made any comparison with Britain’s housing problem in 1945 quite inapposite. It was not until 1933 – some fifteen years...