By John Pickard, Brentwood and Ongar Labour member
What today’s Labour right wing like to air-brush out of history is the fact that the great architect of the NHS, Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, who was Minister for Health when the NHS was founded in 1948, was expelled from the Labour Party and threatened twice more with expulsion for his strident left-wing views.
At a time when Labour’s NEC is preparing to expel hundreds of lefts from the Party, it is worth bearing in mind that some of the ideologues behind the Starmer/Evans drive to the right may not have even been in the Labour Party in the past. People like Peter Mandelson, friend to billionaires, and now an adviser to Starmer, would probably have been in the Tory Party or the old Liberal Party, at best.
Like all politicians anxious to curry favour with the public, many right-wing Labour MPs are quick to heap praise on the work of the NHS and its over-worked, under-paid staff. But the fact is that many of these same people, had they been around in 1948, would have joined with the Tories in opposing the formation of the NHS and they would have bridled at the shift of the Labour Party to the left in the immediate post-war years. At best, they would have joined in the chorus calling for Bevan’s expulsion.
Bevan: “his crime is my crime”
In early 1939, Bevan, then MP for Ebbw Vale, had the temerity to campaign for a united front of all parties – including the Communist Party – against fascism. This was not the official line of the Labour Leadership. Worse still, Bevan refused to follow an instruction from Labour HQ not to appear on any anti-fascist platforms with members of the Communist Party.
The first to be kicked out was Stafford Cripps, who was later Chancellor in the 1945 Labour government. He presented a paper to the NEC in January 1939, arguing the case for a Popular Front against fascism and it was because he had also circulated the paper to CLPs that he was expelled. Nye Bevan was angry at this turn of events and referring to Stafford Cripps’ “crime”, retorted that “His crime is my crime.”
In a subsequent article in the left wing Tribune, newspaper, Bevan wrote that “Cripps was expelled because he claimed the right to tell the Party what he had already told the Executive… This [expulsion] is tantamount to a complete suppression of any opinion in the Party which does not agree with that held by the Executive… If every organised effort to change Party policy is to be described as an organised attack on the Party itself, then the rigidity imposed by Party discipline will soon change into rigor mortis.”
It was as a result of their opposition to Stafford Cripps’ expulsion and for refusing to give a commitment not to appear on platforms with CP members that in March Bevan and other left MPs were also expelled. Bevan continued to defend his right and Cripps’ right to express their opinions. The famous cartoonist David Low captured the mood of many rank and file Labour members when he published a cartoon showing Colonel Blimp – the archetypal figure of a Daily Telegraph reactionary – saying: “The Labour Party is quite right to expel all but sound Conservatives.”
Labour’s right wing wanted an “intellectual concentration camp”
After agreeing to a compromise, to “refrain from conducting or taking part in campaigns in opposition to the declared policy of the Party” all of the expelled MPs were reinstated back in the Party in November the same year.
As an aside, around the same time as Bevan was expelled, the National Advisory Council of the Labour Party League of Youth was suspended “after a complaint that members were constantly urging participation in the Youth Parliament” (The Times, April 4, 1939). The Youth wing’s Advisory Council defiantly issued a statement, “We refuse to be ‘suspended’. We will carry our fight to finish once and for all with the [Tory] Chamberlain government.”
Bevan was again threatened with expulsion by the NEC in 1944, when he spoke and voted in parliament against new wartime regulations that limited the right to strike. He railed against trade union leaders who had supported anti-strike legislation and against ‘Labour’ MPs who were indistinguishable from Tories on the issue.
He was suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party and threatened with further measures, although in the end the sanctions against him were dropped, largely because of Bevan’s popularity. Some of Labour’s right wing, Bevan, explained at the time, wanted the conversion of the Labour Party “into an intellectual concentration camp”
Not expelled by the NEC but suspended by the PLP
Eleven years later, by which time Bevan had, as Health Minister, set up the NHS, although Labour had lost office in 1951, he was threatened a third time with expulsion. Bevan was bitterly opposed to many of the policies of the new right-wing leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, who tried and failed to do away with Clause IV.
In March 1955, when Britain was preparing to test its first hydrogen bomb, Bevan led a revolt of 57 Labour MPs by abstaining on a key vote. The Parliamentary Labour Party voted 141 to 113 to withdraw the whip from him and he came within a whisker of being expelled, only hanging on by a single vote on the NEC. Again, because of his popularity in the party, the parliamentary party restored the whip after only a month.
History never repeats itself exactly, of course, but all of those currently being hounded out of the Labour Party should know that they are in good historical company. It was not Labour’s right wing, but the ‘Bevanites’ and the left who were the real driving force behind the reforms and progressive measures of the 1945 Labour government, not least in the establishment of the NHS.
Indeed, had it not been for the Labour membership and the expression of their feelings at the conference in early 1945, Labour’s wartime coalition ministers would have favoured continuing the coalition with Churchill and the Tories.
No-one remembers the petty bureaucrats who expelled Bevan
Nye Bevan was not a consistent ‘left’ on all issues and at all times. Indeed, on several issues he followed the same policies as Labour’s right wing, such as on Suez in 1956 and later, when he turned full circle and abandoned his previous support for nuclear disarmament. But throughout much of his career he was a thorn in the side of the right wing and for that reason he was popular among party members.
The right wing today, as it was then, is devoid of ideas and policies, but for a slightly pinker version of Conservatism. It is not today’s right wing who will be vindicated, but those on the left who are being demonized and threatened with being kicked out of the party. No-one remembers the small-minded bureaucrats and petty politicians who expelled Nye Bevan and tried twice more, but Bevan himself was vindicated is remembered for it.
A very timely balanced recall of history; a more generous assessment of Labour’s current right wing than deserved. Well done!
At a time when radical left leadership would win significant popular support, we are burdened with a cowardly establishment opportunist. As with Blair, we are invited to vote with a peg on our nose in the naïve hope that Starmer will revert to socialist policies once elected. Believe that and submit to the arrival of men in white coats.
Worth a mention that although Bevan was a constant thorn in the Party’s side in the 30s and the Wartime Coalition, Attlee subsequently appointed him to the key posts of Health, and then Housing.
The cartoon showing Bevan opposing Churchill, with the added comment that he was the only opposition – Labour were then in government, not opposition.