Defeat and Defiance

Early this year, Aneurin Bevan, the Labor Party's aging Young Turk, decided that the time had come to stake his ambitions on what seemed to be two surefire issues. He challenged the Labor Party's leadership by opposing 1) West German rearmament, 2 ) a Southeast Asia pact. To dramatize his rebellion, he resigned from Labor's "Shadow Cabinet," gave up his front seat on the Opposition benches and retreated bulkily to the "Mountain," the backest back bench in the House of Commons, to await the showdown.

Last week the showdown came, but not the way Nye had foreseen. What had looked like promising issues ("No Guns for the Huns") in the spring, turned out to be lost causes in November. In a quiet, closed-door session, the Labor M.P.s agreed overwhelmingly to back the Manila Pact, and afterward Nye did not even bother to appear in the House of Commons when it won easy approval. A few days later the second blow fell: in another private session the Labor M.P.s voted 124 to 72 to support German rearmament. When the Bevanites began their insurrection, they had come within nine votes of defeating Clem Attlee on this issue; now Attlee carried the day by 52 votes.

As if these blows weren't enough, the Labor Party's National Executive peremptorily challenged the Bevanite weekly Tribune for an "unwarranted, irresponsible and scurrilous attack" on right-wing Laborite Arthur Deakin, big boss of the 1,300,000-man Transport & General Workers Union. This, said the Executive, was a specific violation of a party injunction that forbids Laborite leaders to attack one another in public. The Tribune's misbehavior could, if the Labor Executive felt like pressing the issue, lead to the expulsion from the party of the Tribune's three Labor M.P. editors (among them, Nye's wife Jennie Lee).

At this point, like a wounded lion unable to kill, but still able to roar menacingly, the Bevanites answered back with a touch of the old defiance: "Trade union leaders are not a special breed of humanity, always to be shielded from the rough breezes of democracy. They . . . must run the risks of public life if they aspire to hold the prizes and the power. We shall continue to print the truth as we see it."

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