Genius in the Gutter

At the same time that Anthony Eden made Britain's commitment toward German sovereignty and rearmament, Britain's most reckless statesman made a last-ditch effort to exploit the fears and emotions aroused by that issue. Aneurin Bevan did not conceal his purpose: to wrest the Labor Party's leadership from the temperate hands of Clement Attlee.

His arena was the seaside town of Scarborough, where delegates sharing among them the proxies for more than 6,000,000 members of the Labor Party gathered for their annual conference. Nye Bevan's followers were loud and vociferous; only two weeks before, at the Trades Union Congress, they had come close to carrying the day on the German issue. At Scarborough, they expected to be stronger, felt they had Clem Attlee hanging by a thread.

On the platform, Attlee glided into the battle calmly, like a confident parson addressing his flock. The party executive had approved German rearmament only with "serious misgivings," said he, but "I know from experience that you do not get a response from Russia by conciliation." Behind him. Bevan glowered shaggily. Up hopped little, beady-eyed R. W. Casasola, head of the foundry workers, to make the Bevanites' move--a resolution to reverse the Labor executive's position and condemn any sort of German rearmament. Shouted Casasola: "Give the Germans arms, and you are on the sure road to World War III." As speaker after speaker echoed the cry, Bevan beamed and nodded his leonine head in approval. But he could not speak--as a member of the executive, he was barred from speaking against an executive-approved motion.

"Shame, Shame!" Then young (33) Laborite M. P. Desmond Donnelly rose dramatically. Donnelly had been a faithful Bevanite and opponent of German arms. But he had just returned from a trip through Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, Donnelly told the delegates. What he had seen convinced him, "sadly but definitely," that German rearmament was necessary. Said Donnelly: "If every plan for controlled German rearmament is rejected, we shall find ourselves with no controls--but with the arms." Bevanites began to boo. Shouting above the swelling uproar, Donnelly suddenly pointed an accusing finger at Bevan and cried: "Some people will bear a heavy responsibility before history for their folly." Bevan sat flushed and angry.

"Shame, shame!" bellowed outraged Bevanites. "Withdraw! Let Nye reply!" Burly Arthur Deakin, chief of the Transport and General Workers Union and Bevan's frequent antagonist, lumbered to his feet to demand that Donnelly be allowed to continue. Bevan's pent-up anger and frustration burst. "Shut up," he hissed savagely at Deakin. "Shut up yourself!" yelled Deakin. "You big bully!" cried Bevan. "You're afraid of him," snapped Deakin. "Bully yourself!"--accompanying this last thrust by what one newspaper called "a gesture not usually used in polite society."

As the polling began, a tense silence fell over the great hall. When Party Secretary Morgan Phillips received the paper bearing the result, his hand shook. By a vote of 3,270,000 to 3,022,000, the national executive's resolution supporting German rearmament had carried. The margin of 248,000 votes was even closer than it looked: only three days before, the executives of the woodworkers union had met, decided to reverse their anti-rearmament stand at the Trades Union Congress, and to switch their 129,000 votes to Attlee's side. Without that switch, the Bevan forces would have won by 10,000 votes and the official policy of the party turned to neutralism.

Gift from the Gods. It was not by any means Scarborough's only blow at the clamorous ambitions of Nye Bevan. He was soundly licked for party treasurer by his arch rival Hugh Gaitskell and, since he had deliberately refused to stand for sure re-election to the party executive, this left him without an official position in the party leadership for the first time in ten years.

Nye told his followers what he intended to do with his new freedom. "I know now that the right kind of political leader for the Labor Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation," said he bitterly. "Power inside the movement no longer lies inside the executive. I am going outside to meet it where it does lie." It was a flat declaration of war on the party's leadership. By implication, Nye also declared war on the trade-union leaders, who, he hinted, did not represent their members' real wishes. Those leaders reacted promptly. "Mr. Bevan is a remarkable man, but his judgment is, so bad as to bring his genius to the gutter," snapped one unionist. "Apparently in his disappointment, Mr. Bevan has lost his head," said Arthur Deakin.

Bevan had suffered a humiliating and probably a final defeat in his dramatic drive to capture the Labor Party from the moderates. "The strange alliance of Bevanites, pacifists, nonconformists, free-elections-and-reunification-firsters, anti-Germans, carpetbaggers and bandwagon-jumpers and lunatic-fringers was shattered [at Scarborough] and became once more disparate and unhomogeneous," said the Manchester Guardian."This issue was for [Bevan] a gift from the gods, and he failed."

But no one had heard the last of Nye. He was free now, and eager to thump his tub at mill gates, dockyards, and pit heads, trying to woo the workers from their leaders. "Bevan may be dead" said one Laborite,"but he won't lie down."

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