BEHIND BEVANISM

...Like Justice William O. Douglas, it "deplored the condemnation of the risings of the oppressed peoples as Soviet-inspired plots, and affirmed that peace can best be secured by seeing that maximum aid is given to undeveloped areas...

...There was, of course, much that was platitudinous in the Labor Executive statements, and much that was sloganized in the resolutions, and sometimes they could be taken to be in contradiction with each other...

...That is certainly a part of the Bevan controversy...

...While what is called "new thinking" was still going on among the party leaders, the membership were making-do with Bevan's "old feeling" about traditional Socialist slogans...

...Bevanism is thus least powerful in the Parliamentary Executive where the greatest power resides...

...The National Executive is now bravely facing this task on the basis of the decisions reached at the annual conference...

...In the old days the great decisions of peace and war could be made in London...

...The great mass of Labor voters, including the majority of rank-and-file trade unionists who are not much interested in political theories, were reasonably satisfied with postwar full employment and the welfare benefits of Labor policies, but the politically articulate minority, who provide the party workers in the wards, had this elusive sense of disillusion...

...Literally, they have had to rub shoulders with each other, and politically, especially in recent months, they have sometimes rubbed each other the wrong way...

...From the time of the Morecambe Conference these stresses and strains have become more severe...

...A Socialist Government, it was felt then, could directly bring about a new set of international relationships...

...That is the real background to Bevanism, more important than any question of personalities...

...What we are essentially dealing with is a clash, not so much of policies, as of outlook...

...It urged the expansion of East-West trade and "resistance to the use of our military strength as a means of forcing territorial changes in Eastern Europe or elsewhere...

...At Morecambe the Bevanites ended up with six seats out of twenty-seven...

...Ill The conference approved the Executive's statements on home and foreign affairs...

...It agreed that "Labor can best serve the cause of peace by sticking to its distinctive Socialist principles and refusing to subordinate them to American, Russian, or any other pressures...

...In its long library fronting the Thames, the Labor M.P.'s jostle each other at the writing tables as they plod through their constituents' correspondence, for they have no private office facilities and few of them can afford to keep a secretary on $3,000 a year and pay their own postage as well...

...And the rank-and-file were not prepared to be reminded that Bevan had himself made one of the major speeches in support of the program he later attacked, and that Attlee had hedged the program around with conditions which he had later been able to show had not been fulfilled...

...The public ownership of the basic industries and services like coal and banking and transport, the provision of medical aid as a public service, and the widening of social security enjoyed the agreement of almost all, and everyone was kept busy working them out...

...But at Westminster the M.P.'s who represent both unions and local parties gave Morrison 194 votes to 82 in a direct test of strength with Bevan...

...There is an inevitable sense of resentment at this new feeling of dependence, and this gives rise to "anti-Americanism," and also to a deeply-felt desire for "more independent" policies abroad to match "more Socialist" policies at home...

...It is this lack of a policy that is the key to the dangerous gap which at present exists between the leaders in Parliament and the rank-and-file in the country...

...This uneasy situation has led to public quarreling which has done the party a good deal of harm...

...But by the General Election of 1950 all these things had been put on the statute book, and the new majority was so small that the Labor Government could do little even of what it knew it wanted to do...

...The present fevers will only fade when a practical program is arrived at that is acceptable to the trade unions and is sufficiently inspiring to harness the Socialist evangelism of the local branches...

...Although constitutionalist and gradualist in practice, its members have never ceased to be haunted by the "impossibilist" visions on which Bernard Shaw used to pour scorn of "capitalism in full swing on Monday, a bloodless revolution on Tuesday, and the millenium in full swing on Wednesday...

...The British Labor Party is basically an alliance between national labor unions with a membership of about five millions, and local political Socialist branches with a membership of about one million...

...Nor were they prepared to object that Bevan had failed to state precisely how much less arms, and how much more Socialism and independence he believed in...

...It was all quite different back in 1945...

...The Bevanites blame attacks on them by Hugh Gaitskell and others for this...

...The latter constitute for the most part the active Party workers, and they elect their own seven members to the National Executive...

...It is American policy that most Britishers agree they have the most direct chance of influencing...

...There was so much to do then...

...The impact of the American Presidential campaign on the Labor Party can be clearly seen from these resolutions...

...And it appears to enjoy a majority of support among the Party workers...

...British Socialism, drawing its inspiration from the ethics of Methodism rather than the economics of Marxism, has always been Utopian in its instincts...

...Somehow they felt we ought to have "more Socialism," but what exactly was meant by the phrase no one was too sure...

...And to a majority of rank-and-file Socialists, by the time the annual Labor Party conference met at Morecambe last fall, events had proved him right...

...Men and women feel that the rise and fall of their ambitions are under intimate scrutiny that bids them be face-saving when it would be better to be self-effacing...

...All the things that the Labor Party had educated and agitated and organized for during half a century had to be written into the laws of the land...

...But this aspect of Bevanism is the least significant one...

...Eisenhower, and John Foster Dulles' appointment as the next Secretary of State is likely to strengthen the outlook represented by Bevan...

...And somehow after five years of Labor Government, after nationalizing 20 per cent of the economy, society did not seem as MORGAN THOMSON, editor of the Glasgow Forward, was recently elected to Britain's House of Commons as Labor Member from Dundee...

...At Morecambe they gave Bevan a 90 per cent vote, and failed to elect Herbert Morrison who has been Deputy Prime Minister all the years of the Labor Government...

...Again, in foreign affairs many devoted party workers, while being self-consciously Socialist and abhorring power politics, were also, ironically enough, unconsciously accustomed to seeing Britain's international problems as if she were still a Great Power...

...These committed the party to a recognition that the basic problem domestically is how, on a little island, to feed 50 million people previously supported by a pattern of world trade blown to smithereens in the war, and that this cannot be solved by any "Socialism in one country" but only by international economic cooperation...

...A good deal will depend upon what happens to Bevan as a minority of one on the "Shadow Cabinet," and even the Conservative press in Britain—or at least its more responsible organs— is willing to concede that in a two-party system like ours, any serious breach in the Labor Party's traditional alliance between the Socialist constituency parties and the trade unions could be of benefit neither at home nor abroad...

...They defeated decisively attempts to reject NATO and cooperation with America...

...II The feeling lingers on, and it is hard to accept that these life-or-death decisions are now made in Moscow or Washington, and that Britain's power lies not in her independent actions but in the international influence she can bring to, bear on those more powerful than herself...

...The newspapers dramatize and personalize all this, partly because it is entertaining and readable, partly because it is in their political interest to sow dissension...

...Out in the constituencies, too, the same question was being posed, and there the atmosphere, though without the electrical storms of the personal attractions and repulsions in Parliament, had certain foggy wisps of frustration floating around...

...Since 1945 some three or four hundred Labor M.P's have had to spend long hours in this crowded and rather insulated atmosphere...

...The alternative would be a deepening of the present divisions...

...and arriving at a -great many different answers in the explosively confined physical space of Parliament...

...There was an inevitable and tempting lull, and Satan will always find work for idle legislators' minds to do—such as asking each other, "Where do we go from here...

...But at Westminster only Aneurin Bevan himself was elected to a committee of twelve...

...Words are uttered in heat that ought to be forgotten, but unfortunately aren't...

...Since Morecambe, Labor has fought two by-elections at Clevedon and High Wycombe, where the swing has been slightly to the Tories...

...At the last by-election before Morecambe there was a swing of over seven per cent to Labor, and the Conservative Government seemed completely demoralized...

...The Executive then accepted from the floor resolutions calling for a further five-year list of industries to be transferred to public ownership and for radical educational reforms...

...In foreign affairs they reaffirmed their support for UN while repeating that Communist China should be placed on the Security Council as soon as possible...

...It is a vocal minority in the National Executive...

...The references to China and to Eastern Europe are directly related to what is seen here as John Foster Dulles' influence with Gen...

...the non-Bevanites say that the Bevanites have scared the floating voters with too much socialism...

...The hope is that there will be enough give-and-take to translate these generalities into an agreed governmental program...

...Bevanism has swept through the constituency parties precisely because one of the most colorful of Cabinet Ministers resigned and declared that we were not independent enough to resist too heavy an arms burden, and not Socialist enough to resist paying for it out of the health service...

...The elections that have taken place, first to the National Executive of the party, and later to its "Shadow Cabinet" in Parliament have illustrated that...

...changed" as convinced Socialists had hoped it would be...

...It is more likely that voters are simply confused by the personalities that have been exchanged, and are conscious that Labor is not expressing any clear-cut policies for the time...

...Churchill had had to cut the arms program by an unspecified amount and the Labor Party leadership had had to pledge itself to restore the health service cuts in their entirety...