The Showdown Over Bevan
ARNOLD, G. L.
The Showdown Over Bevan By G. L. Arnold FERMENT A decade after the end of World War II, changes and fissures are developing in old leadership as a new generation comes to the surface. The...
...For, over the weekend, most Labor Members of Parliament were in touch with their constituents, and what they heard on this occasion may well have cooled their ardor when it comes to voting for Bevan's expulsion from the Parliamentary party this week...
...For better or worse, the postwar generation in all three movements is making all of its old leaders struggle...
...The reasons are different in free countries and slave, democratic countries and totalitarian, font it is interesting that 1953 saw new leaders in the U.S...
...The Guardian, incidentally, does not share the general belief that this is a good issue on which to risk a party split, and the Conservative Daily Telegraph suggests editorially that, while Bevan may have dug his political grave, Bevanism will go marching on...
...London It looks as though Aneurin Bevan has pressed his luck too far this time...
...The possibility that his act of defiance would be popularly interpreted as a clarion call against atomic rearmament had, in some measure (although not entirely), been removed by Bevan himself, since his criticism of the Government's acceptance of the use of thermonuclear weapons turned upon an argument too complex for most people to grasp...
...Whatever the technicalities of Bevan's own argument over atomic strategy and Government policy, there is a danger that the public, which does not read speeches very carefully, will conclude that he is being expelled for opposing the use of the hydrogen bomb?a complete misunderstanding, but one which so expert a tactician may well have counted on when he staged his spectacular rebellion...
...The last word, however, must be spoken by the annual party conference, which may well reinstate him, especially if a major split should threaten...
...and USSR, 1954 the beginnings of political realignment in France and Japan...
...In particular, the fact that a very large minority of the Parliamentary party is sure to vote against his expulsion does not mean that many of these people are prepared to bolt the party on his behalf...
...From this it follows that he would, at least temporarily, sit in Parliament as an independent and possibly run as such at the next election, which most observers now predict for this autumn...
...The three articles which follow show inexorable processes at work in three environments: free Britain's democratic Labor party, free Italy's Communist party and the Soviet Communist party...
...That such expulsion would entail similar action by the national Labor party executive, on which Bevan has 6 supporters out of 27 members, is taken for granted...
...As against the argument that Bevan's expulsion will split the Labor party and lose the election, the dominant trade-union group is known to hold that, after a brief upheaval, the movement will close abandoned by most of his nominal supporters...
...It may well have seemed to the party leaders that unity could no longer be preserved unless the arch-rebel was disciplined...
...the fact is that men who were the pillars of political life in the prewar era are now pushing 70, while the draftable men of that era are first beginning to exert political influence...
...As matters now stand, therefore, everything points to the probability that, while Bevan may sit as a lonely figure in Parliament for some months, he will return to the fold before long?though no longer as a prospective leader of the party...
...But for the fact that he has been confined indoors by influenza, his political fate indeed might have been settled last weekend...
...The delay "imposed by his illness, which has prevented him from confronting his opponents on the Labor party executive, may, however, have saved him—of such trivialities is history compounded...
...Several influential Bevanites are now busy explaining that, while they share his views on British defense policy, they deplore his action in publicly challenging Attlee's leadership in the March 4 Parliamentary debate on Churchill's statement about the hydrogen bomb...
...Among them are many who hope that, after the filial warning addressed to him by Richard Crossman two days later, he will now keep silent and give his defenders a chance to patch up a compromise or, in the Manchester Guardian's words, "leave others to fight over his recumbent body...
...It was, indeed, this calculated affront to Attlee's leadership, rather than the somewhat technical case he outlined against the Government's conception of military strategy, which finally decided Bevan's opponents to seek a showdown...
...The surprising announcement on March 8 that the Labor party leadership had at last decided to force a showdown is understood to have followed an unusually lively meeting of the Parliamentary party's steering committee, at which the right-wingers, led by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell, overcame Clement Attlee's constitutional reluctance to abandon his strategic position midway between the factions...
...Previously, some of the more ardent right-wingers had vented their fury on Attlee for his alleged failure to keep Bevan under control...
...This led to the paradoxical result that he was supported in the Parliamentary vote by a motley group of pacifists and neutralists whose views he does not share, while his real supporters, who include some influential figures, voted for Attlee's amendment and are now busy deploring Bevan's tactics...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
