Bevin Y. Bevan

Bevin v. Bevan

Ernest Bevin, the bull elephant of British labor, last week sat bulkily silent, beadily watchful, in the back row at a caucus of Parliament's Laborite members. The proposal: to expel from the Party his homonym--pink, grizzled Welshman Aneurin Bevan. The crime: Laborite Be-van's revolt against Labor Minister Bevin in the House of Commons.

At the tense and troubled meeting, Aneurin Bevan refused to recant. He argued that if he were bounced, 15 other Laborites who sided with him would also have to go. All over Britain, he warned, labor unions were rising against tough, truculent Ernie Bevin's Defense Regulation IAA (five years in prison for strike fomenters).

As Aneurin Bevan talked, Ernie Bevin restlessly shifted his weight, impatiently flung his farm-hardened hands about in gestures he had long used to brush aside opponents, soundlessly worked his pudgy lips. At the end there was no decision. The caucus chairman, indecisive Socialist Arthur Greenwood, was clearly afraid that the ouster would fail. And failure would have been equal to repudiation of Ernest Bevin, a serious thing on the eve of Britain's greatest war effort. The crisis was postponed. But it remained a crisis.

Way of a Fighter. It was totally unlike Ernie Bevin to duck a slambang, winner-take-all fight. Fighting had been his meat & drink when he rose from farmhand to be an unpaid union secretary, then a big-time Laborite, organizer of the 1926 General Strike, and founder of Britain's biggest independent union, the powerful (850,000 members) Transport and General Workers.

Since May 1940, Bevin's hard task had been to take away from labor most of the advantages he and others had won for it. The Labor Minister's enormous powers over 33 million Britons, aged 14 to 64, enabled him to get on with the job, but not to keep his friends. Workers who had once followed him blindly came to distrust his close relationship with Churchill, his warm friendship with such Tories as Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, Minister of State Richard K. Law, Viscount Cranborne, leader of the House of Lords. A mounting rank-&-file revolt against Labor leaders in general and Bevin in particular produced a wave of unauthorized strikes in coal mines, factories, shipyards. Regulation iAA was Fighter Bevin's unpopular answer.

Through it all, Bevin remained the Ernie of old--harsh-voiced, pontifical, given to great gusts of laughter and oratory. In the House of Commons bar at noontime he continued to drink as long as he had companions, before lunching alone on bread, cheese, beer. Last week Writer-Critic Harold Laski depicted the Bevin of 1944: "Mr. Bevin has never, since he emerged as a trade-union leader of importance, liked criticism, still less opposition. ... He is always certain that he is right. . . . Masterful in temper, obstinate in disposition, accustomed . . . to give orders which must be obeyed.. . ."

For Ernie Bevin, such tart criticism was beside the point. His task, getting tougher by the day, was still to keep British labor in battle line, and if possible to save himself while doing so.

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