Challenge to Bevan

In the Bevanites' theology, British socialism is a heady brew of rigid dogma, class hatred and "one in the eye for the boss." For the practiced old trade union chiefs of Transport House, who put up some 60% of Labor Party funds and speak for 85% of its membership, socialism is an alteration, not an abolition, of capitalism, an evolution steeped in the Fabian "inevitability of gradualness." From two general-election failures, trade unionists sense that Labor's medicine, heavily laced with Bevanism, is too strong for most Britons.

Since they ousted ex-Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison from the Party Executive last year, the Bevanites have influenced policy out of all proportion to their real power. Last month the party's "Challenge to Britain" platform called for partial nationalization of the complex aircraft, machine-tool and chemical industries. But last week the Trades Union Congress (183 unions, 8,000,000 members) staged a counterattack. Keynoted Chairman Tom O'Brien: "The British trades union movement created the Labor Party, and if the child thinks it is going to devour the father, it must be told there is nothing doing."

The biennial conference of the Transport and General Workers' Union--Britain's biggest--met at Southsea, hard by Portsmouth docks. Bevanites hoped to make trouble. When bluff, able Arthur Deakin, 62, the union's general secretary, marched into the hall, packed with 800 representatives of the union's truck drivers and milkmen, trawlermen and stable lads, home helps and gravediggers, someone reminded him that Nelson's flagship Victory, with its hangman's yardarm, was not far away. Deakin smiled grimly. "We don't need the yardarm," said he.

A Shout of Applause. "The test of nationalization," Deakin told his delegates, "must be, 'How will it serve the interests of the people?' Nobody can say that . . . it has achieved satisfactory success. There is no wholesale and general approbation . . . There is a feeling that . . . conditions of the work people in the nationalized industries have been improved at the expense of the consumer."

Should there be more nationalization, as the Bevanites propose? Boomed Deakin: "Where do you begin? Where do you end? We will have no precipitate action that would involve us . . . in chaos and confusion . . ." Next day he fought off a resolution that censured his anti-Bevanite stand. "I am perfectly sure I have 95% of the membership behind me," he said. The answer: a great shout of applause.

Reassured by Deakin's triumph, union leaders went right on planning a greater blow at Bevan: a policy statement that would cut right across the "Challenge to Britain," and the re-election of Herbert Morrison to the Executive, in place of ailing, respected Arthur Greenwood, 73. Said one union man: "The days of the hotheads are over . . ."

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