Muttering Left

Arthur Greenwood, Labor Party leader in Britain's House of Commons, ambled alone into the House bar, washed down the bitter taste of a bitter defeat with two double Scotches in two minutes. He stood silent and lonely for another five minutes, then ambled away. On his mind was a pink, popeyed Labor rebel named Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan.

Socialist Greenwood had just lost a fight to expel Nye Bevan from the Party for a revolt against the topside line. He had even threatened to resign if Bevan were upheld. But on the showdown Greenwood had to eat his threat. Defiant Nye Bevan, a onetime Welsh miner and long a loud voice for Labor's militant left, had won a significant victory.

By 71 votes to 60, his colleagues declined to discipline Bevan for attacking the Labor Party's Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin and his tough anti-strike regulation (TIME, May 15). Instead, the party caucus proposed to let the whole thing die in committee. Chuckled unrepentant Nye Bevan: "If the Party executive [ruling committee] can keep it quiet at the [annual] Conference they will. But it'll have to come up ... and the rank and file won't let it pass."

Muted Thunder. The unity of the Labor Party was at stake. Bevan had become the voice of a deep unrest, an equally deep suspicion among the working masses on whom the Party depends.

Britons who fought abroad had returned home, some whole, some wounded, to bombed-out families living in shabby, cramped houses, to wives worn out by long hours in factory jobs. Britons who stayed home were fatigued by the war grind, more than ready to question the national leadership on the home front (including the Labor Party leaders in the Churchill coalition).

Britons who had never dreamed of joining the Labor Party shared this feeling. Still unready to challenge Winston Churchill's conduct of the war itself, millions were in a mood to challenge his (and the whole official coalition's) contention that the conduct of the war justified the Government's conduct of everything else. Specifically, they demanded sufficient guarantees that Britain was going to be a better place to live in and work in after the war.

They had Winston Churchill's repeated, often angry assurances. They had such concrete evidence as the coalition Government's radically progressive new education bill. They had the demonstrated fact that the Tory party leaders, no fools, were not nearly so reactionary as the party label indicated. But there were many signs that all of these things were not enough. One sign was Aneurin Sevan's successful revolt. He could never have got away with it if he had not bespoken the mood of many Britons, moving with him toward a new postwar labor leadership.

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