Aneurin Bevan Welsh Greats

Half a century after his death,

Aneurin Bevan's greatest legacy is still a part of all our lives.

The National Health Service.

It made free healthcare accessible to all for the first time.

Bevan was a working-class politician

who said he wanted to empower the masses.

The argument is about power

and only about power.

Because only by the possession of power

can you get the priorities correct.

An outstanding orator and political operator,

he had to draw on all his skills and natural cunning

to fight the medical establishment,

who fought him every inch of the way.

He knew the moment in which he had to give something to the medical profession

in order to stop them totally sabotaging his new National Health Service.

He was also a controversial figure.

He alienated many of his friends

and divided both his party and public opinion.

There's a kind of slightly self-destructive element to Bevan.

He's not just another bland politician,

he's somebody with bags of character.

Aneurin Bevan was born in Tredegar, in 1897.

He grew up in this miner's cottage,

with nine brothers and sisters

born to David and Phoebe Bevan.

Only six survived.

These were tough times in South Wales.

I was a member of a large family.

And you didn't want to know the days of the week by the calendar,

you could tell it by what appeared on the table.

Towards the end of the week,

the fare was always much more meagre than at the beginning.

But if Aneurin's childhood was materially impoverished,

it was rich in other ways.

His parents were staunch chapel-goers,

and his father, in particular,

had a lively interest in politics, music and literature.

You don't understand Aneurin Bevan unless you understand

how dynamic a society Edwardian Wales was.

It was aspirational, it was educational

and it was, in all senses,

a society that had a belief in its own destiny.

And so did Bevan.

He was so deeply shaped by his Tredegar, his working-class roots

and, of course, he also had that Methodist upbringing.

I guess you could say he was drinking deeply

of the kind of two great wellsprings of Labour politics.

Aneurin went to Sirhowy School, but he was not happy there.

He was left-handed, he had a stammer,

and he was picked on by his headmaster.

He got into trouble...

Well, his worst trouble with his headmaster was not about himself,

it was when the headmaster was sneering at another little boy

who couldn't come to school that day

because his brother was wearing the shoes.

And Nye, all his life,

just automatically defended the weak and the defenceless.

He threw an inkwell at the headmaster.

Aneurin found his real education outside school.

Some of the most vivid hours of my life.

I remember reading at home the books I used to get from the library.

I used to go down there a few times a week and went home loaded with books.

I was able to obtain a rather larger number of books than most of the others

because I was a member of a large family

and I used to use their names to get a lot of books for myself.

When he was 13,

he followed in his father's footsteps and went down the mine.

The South Wales coalfield,

which provided work for 200,000 men in more than 600 pits,

was a hotbed of union activity.

Bevan was politically active from the off.

At 19, he became the youngest lodge chairman

in the history of the South Wales Miners' Federation.

At 21, he won a scholarship

to the Central Labour College, in London,

a training ground for the most promising young trade unionists.

When he returned to Tredegar in 1921,

the Miners' Federation had been weakened by a failed strike,

and Bevan spent most of the next five years out of work.

It was during this period that he met Archie Lush.

Lush, who was also on the dole,

was to play a key role in Bevan's life.

He was always talking in the streets, you know.

He had a sort of Socratic method of teaching

with a crowd of chaps around him.

And I listened to this fellow

and, suddenly, I began to realise that I was not unemployed

because of the failure of this little fella, Archie Lush,

but because society had failed.

I was prepared to fight Capitalist society from that moment on.

And from then on, we became very close and very intimate.

Lush became Bevan's right-hand man.

Together, they vowed to transform Tredegar.

At that time, it was a company town,

dominated by the Tredegar Iron And Coal Company.

Bevan gathered around him a handful of like-minded young men,

dedicated to breaking the company's stranglehold on public life.

They called themselves The Query Club.

Packing meetings with their own supporters,

the members of this radical cell got themselves elected

onto the board of the Working Men's Institute,

and onto the Urban District Council.

They didn't wake up to the fact that we were gradually

filching power away from them for quite a time.

By then, we were in power.

In council meetings, the members of the Query Club

employed covert methods of communication

to co-ordinate their actions.

If Aneurin did this,

we took no notice of what he was saying.

That was intended to deceive the meeting.

But if Aneurin caught, did the Gladstonian pose,

from then on, we drafted the resolution in those terms.

In 1926, when the miner's fight to preserve their pay and conditions

led to the General Strike,

Bevan co-ordinated the strikers in Tredegar.

The strike collapsed and the miners were locked out for seven months.

Bevan helped organise the soup kitchens that fed their families.

The failure of the General Strike helped convince Bevan

that parliamentary politics might offer a quicker route to power

than trade unionism.

Bevan and The Query Club had already infiltrated

Tredegar's District Council.

They now had a new target in their sights.

We felt, you know,

that we ought to have control of schools and education in Tredegar.

And we had to put Aneurin on the County Council.

His answer was that we sent him down there to look for more power,

and when he got there, he found there was no more there

than in the Urban District Council.

So the only one thing to do now was push him on to Parliament,

which we proceeded to do as rapidly as we could.

But first, The Query Club would have to deal

with Ebbw Vale's sitting Labour MP - Evan Davies,

a politician of the old school,

who'd become complacent about his position.

They get rid of him. I mean, they, they do all kinds of tricks.

I mean, if there is a Watergate in South Wales,

it is how Bevan becomes elected as an MP.

The Query Club fixed it for him. And I mean fixed it.

With that help, Bevan beat Evan Davies

and he became the preferred parliamentary candidate

of the Miners' Federation.

In 1929, at the age of 31,

he was elected Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale.

I said, "Well, what are these really top people like

"that you meet in Parliament, Nye?"

And his answer was simple and straightforward, he said,

"Extraordinary, boyo, how ordinary these extraordinary fellas are when you meet them."

Well, that meant that we could encompass even those people.

At Westminster, Bevan immediately made a big impression on the House.

The greatest Welsh politician of the day, of course,

was David Lloyd George.

And what does Bevan do? He attacks him, straight away.

Bevan's maiden speech goes, if you like, right for the jugular.

This is my fellow countryman, this is my compatriot

and what is he about?

Ultimately, he's about defending the interests,

not of the working classes, where I'm coming from,

but the interests of the bosses, the capitalists, the plutocrats...

So, from the beginning, this is naked stuff.

To become the outstanding public speaker that he was,

he'd had to overcome the handicap of his stammer,

and he'd done that wandering the hills above Tredegar.

Aneurin made some wonderful speeches up here.

And the only people who listened to him were the sheep.

I used to always judge as to how effective it would be

by the number of sheep who ran away when he started speaking.

Bevan was not a great platform orator

in the sense of some Mussolini.

He had a very rather light voice,

rather strange voice coming from this big man.

It's the first time in my lifetime

that we have had a Tory government in Great Britain

without having had mass unemployment at the same time.

Bevan is about being sarcastic,

he's about being intellectual, argumentative,

he's a master of the barb,

of the visceral shot across the bows, into the guts.

And I think it suited him, you know, the face-to-face debate.

No-one dealt with hecklers better than Aneurin.

I remember one fella heckling him

and, like a flash, he came back with a riposte at once, you know.

Please listen carefully, because if you don't,

you'll be as dull going out as you were coming in.

LAUGHTER

And when he used the editorial "we" in a meeting and somebody said,

"Who do you mean 'we'?"

He said, "All of us, except you." He could kill them stone dead.

He used to argue that, in order to destroy an opponent,

the best thing to do was to pick,

not the weakest part of his speech,

but the strongest part,

because if you could knock out the strongest part,

you could destroy it altogether.

It was so logically perfect,

it was more like a Greek philosophical essay

where each point led inescapably to the next.

Until, at the end, you realise you've been carried

into a conclusion that you just couldn't avoid.

Bevan flourished during his first term in Parliament.

But, by the early 1930s, the Labour government,

led by Ramsay MacDonald, was in deep trouble.

MacDonald and the Labour government of '29 were so unlucky,

because they came into power at exactly the moment

when the world economy was tanking.

The Wall Street Crash happens in 1929,

there's a banking crisis across Europe

and they're completely blown off course,

they don't get the chance

to put any of their policies, really, into operation.

MacDonald and a couple of the other big Labour figures

actually went into coalition with the Tories and the Liberals

in the national government.

And, for somebody like Bevan,

that experience is absolutely foundational.

What it proved was that, you know,

the Party kind of hierarchy can never be trusted.

During this turbulent time,

Bevan met a fellow MP who would become a key figure in his life.

Jennie Lee, a miner's daughter from Fife

and the youngest member of the House Of Commons.

The first day I met him, he was standing on the terrace,

he was dressed in a black coat and striped trousers,

laughing very loudly and I thought, "What a horror."

What Jennie didn't know was that it was Bevan's mother

who'd bought his outfit for him, at Tredegar Co-op.

In truth, they were a well-matched couple.

They were both coal miners' children

who shared a love of the arts and a passionate belief in Socialism.

In 1934, they were married at Holborn Register Office.

Jennie was a very, very important force in Nye's life,

intellectually and politically.

Jennie's political analysis was sharper than Nye's.

She was a very attractive, lovely woman.

He depended as a human being

on her support and her love.

The marriage was, for the time, I think, relatively open

and was, in that sense, a modern marriage.

So she's a vital force in his life, full of art and music and colour.

He adored music and painting.

We had very few politicians among our private friends,

they were nearly all artists, they all came to him.

Aneurin and Jennie's bohemian friends,

and their taste for the good life,

earned them a reputation as Bollinger Bolsheviks.

But the good times were about to come to an end.

The outbreak of the Second World War,

which saw Labour join the Conservatives

in a wartime coalition government,

proved a defining moment in Bevan's career.

It's the Second World War that really sees Bevan emerge

onto the national stage.

Effective opposition is limited to those few people

who will stand out and speak, for example, for civil liberties

and who will speak against the strategy of the war.

He's very fierce against Churchill

and against what he sees as the kind of aristocratic elite

that are running the British Army.

Churchill calls him "a squalid nuisance"

because he gets under Churchill's skin.

He has the intellect, the skill,

the mastery of the house to be this constant burr.

You know, it was very risky to be criticising the national warfare

at a time of sort of supreme national emergency.

And I think, at the time, what it probably suggested to people

was that there was an element of unreliability in Bevan.

Yeah, if you're all rowing one way and there's one man who's rowing the other,

that's not necessarily an ideal recipe for government.

The question of Bevan's fitness for government

was thrown into sharp relief when, at the end of the war,

Labour swept to victory in the 1945 General Election.

This great victory shows that the country

is ready for a new policy to face new world conditions.

That it believes that Labour has the right policy

and also has the men to carry it out.

In a move that surprised many,

Prime Minister Clement Attlee named Bevan as one of those men,

when he made him Minister of Health and Housing.

What Attlee obviously saw was that it would be better to have Bevan

within the government, as they say, you know...

inside the tent, relieving himself outwards,

rather than outside urinating onto their tent.

But I think Attlee recognised

that there's all this pent-up energy and enthusiasm

and if you can really channel that, which they do,

then, you can have something tremendous at the end of it.

Bevan was tasked with the enormous challenge

of creating a new national health service.

Healthcare in Britain at that time was a patchy affair,

provided by a mixture of insurance companies, local councils,

and cash-strapped charitable hospitals.

For the poorest, falling ill could be a financial disaster.

But in Tredegar, workers had established a Medical Aid Society,

which provided free healthcare

in return for a subscription from its members.

Taking this model as his inspiration,

Bevan set out to "Tredegarise" Britain.

As a minister, Bevan is, quite frankly, spectacular.

He goes for a national health service,

free at the point of delivery and excellent wherever it's offered.

And he does so in the face of enormous opposition

from the British Medical Association.

It's the GPs more than anybody else, I mean, who saw their profession

as something that Bevan was interfering with

and their resentment was the resentment of professional people,

who felt that, you know,

they were being turned into servants of the state.

I can tell you that the medical profession is red in tooth and claw

when it comes to opposing a Labour minister

doing something they are frightened of.

Bevan overcame the opposition of the medical establishment

through a strategy of divide and conquer.

He courted the influential Royal College Of Physicians

and agreed to some of their demands.

Bevan, almost by his sheer force of charisma,

and by dedication and effort,

gets the consultants to agree to the foundation of the NHS.

Sure, he had to make a few compromises along the way, you know,

private practice still goes on,

you have sort of pay beds in hospitals and things,

and he famously said he "stuffed their mouths with gold."

Once he got the Harley Streets and the Wimpole Streets

of this world into the scheme,

the opposition in the main was defeated.

What made Bevan effective, what made him matter,

was that he tempered the idealism

with a kind of pragmatic attention to detail,

an ability to get things done.

And I think that's, that's his greatness, really,

that he doesn't lose the crusading zeal,

but he's able to put it into practise,

and to make the little compromises you'll find you have to do

if you want to get anything achieved.

'On July 5th, the new National Health Service starts...'

The scale of Bevan's achievement would be made clear

on the 5th of July 1948 -

the day the new National Health Service was launched.

But Bevan chose the eve of that launch

to make the most controversial speech of his career.

In a public meeting at Manchester,

he contrasted the new health service with the social injustices

he'd witnessed in the Tredegar of his youth.

In his words,

"No amount of cajolery can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred

"for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me.

"So far as I am concerned, they are lower than vermin."

He was not talking about the ordinary Conservative voter,

he was thinking of those days in the Welsh Valley

when people were starving, of the unemployment,

his father died in his arms of pneumoconiosis,

he remembered the humiliation of good people that he'd loved.

Now, that was the vermin that Nye was talking about.

Bevan's speech caused uproar in the national press.

This was appreciated by the Conservative Central Office,

they founded a thing called The Vermin Club.

You wore in your buttonhole a sort of caterpillar

and I think it won us thousands of votes.

It was a silly thing to do,

because that sort of rudeness about your political opponents

antagonises people who aren't particularly interested in politics.

And, often, antagonises even your own party.

The speech earned Bevan a sharp rebuke

from the prime minister, Clement Attlee.

There's a kind of slightly self-destructive element to Bevan.

He can't stop himself showing that he's the bad boy, you know,

that he hasn't just become another establishment figure.

But, you know, Bevan, in the late 1940s,

he's not that far away from the Labour leadership.

You know, he really incarnates the soul of the Labour movement.

And it's almost as though there's a little death wish there.

Bevan's NHS turned out to be

something of a bureaucratic behemoth.

And the money that had been set aside to finance it

was woefully inadequate.

When we had this discussion before,

in the Cabinet about this matter,

there were some of my comrades who suggested

that perhaps we might meet the increased cost

of the National Health Service

by making a contribution from the Insurance Fund,

which had grown to enormous proportions.

Well, of course, the Treasury had to tell us!

There's no fund.

LAUGHTER

It's just an... It's just an actuarial fiction.

In his 1951 budget, the Labour Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell,

diverted money from the NHS to fund a national re-armament programme.

He did it by introducing prescription charges

for glasses and dentures.

This was a step too far for Bevan.

'The resignation of Mr Bevan

'as a result of his opposition to the budget...'

For Bevan, the principle of the Health Service

being free at the point of delivery was crucial.

It wasn't something that he was prepared to compromise about

and, for him, it was the DNA, the watermark, if you like,

of that Labour government.

For Bevan, it was personal as well as political.

Bevan resents the fact that Gaitskell as Chancellor

is the kind of cunning man.

And I think he's had enough, by 1951,

of the kind of compromises of office.

He wants to flounce out.

And I think that's the great tragedy, really, of his career.

That if he'd stayed in

and if he had worked with Gaitskell and with Attlee,

then, Labour would have been far more effective.

You know, they didn't need to lose power in 1951.

But lose, they did.

In 1951, Winston Churchill re-entered Number 10,

and Labour were cast out into opposition.

Bevan became the standard-bearer for the left wing of the party.

A group of disciples gathered around him,

calling themselves the Bevanites.

There were three or four who were completely dedicated to him

and hung on his words as though he were one of the great prophets

and they supported him, right or wrong.

The Bevanites attacked the right wing of the party,

in the shape of Hugh Gaitskell and the trade-union leaders who supported him.

Why is it that your group

has been so free in denigrating personalities

among the trade union leaders?

-This is a mere repetition of newspaper headlines.

-Not at all!

-Not at all.

-Where has been a denigration?

Well, the latest example was the criticism

of Lincoln Evans for accepting a knighthood.

Do you concur with that attack?

Now, now, now, you're being very naughty, as you know.

You must not try and inveigle me

into making personal attacks on my colleagues.

Your group has not been nearly as coy as that.

This perpetual sniping and conflict within the party

brought out the worst aspects of Bevan's character.

Bevan was a great man, no question.

Great men tend to be, you know, Churchill, Lloyd George,

all these characters, they're often incredibly childish,

egotistical, selfish, self-centred, manipulative...

Bevan was all of those things, you know, with knobs on.

In many ways, they make him quite likeable, you know,

he's not just another bland politician.

He's somebody with bags of character.

This internecine warfare would cost Bevan dear.

The subsequent years of quarrel within the Labour Party of the '50s

effectively prevented him from attaining, you know,

the position, leader of the party, Prime Minister,

that he was clearly hoping for.

In 1954, Bevan lost out to Gaitskell

in the contest for the post of Party Treasurer.

A year later, Gaitskell was once again the winner,

this time, in the election for Labour Party Leader.

I greatly appreciate the confidence

which the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party

have shown in me in electing me to this extremely important position.

The in-fighting had damaged not only Bevan's career

but also the fortunes of the Labour Party itself.

The party was deeply divided, couldn't be trusted with government,

they were too busy fighting one another.

Very unhealthy and very unfortunate.

And what it did was, it meant that Gaitskell, who was a, you know,

a very talented politician, a very appealing one in many ways,

he was never able to go to the country in a general election

to say, "You know, I've got a united party behind me

"and we're ready to lead."

Labour would remain in opposition for 13 years.

But, within the party, some kind of truce was declared

when Gaitskell gave Bevan the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary.

When Britain embarked on an ill-advised and underhand invasion of Egypt

in the 1956 Suez Crisis,

Bevan used all his rhetorical powers

to castigate the Prime Minister of the day.

Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending

that he is now invading Egypt

in order to strengthen the United Nations.

CHEERING

And every, every, um...

every burglar, of course, could say the same thing.

LAUGHTER

He could argue that he was entering the house

in order to train the police.

LAUGHTER

So if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying,

and he may be...

LAUGHTER

..he may be,

then, if he is sincere in what he is saying,

then, he is too stupid to be a prime minister.

CHEERING

In another powerful speech the following year,

Bevan made a U-turn that would shock many of his colleagues.

For years, he had been an outspoken opponent of the nuclear arms race.

Many on the left looked at him for leadership on the issue.

But, in 1957, he turned on his followers

and scorned their idea that Britain should go it alone,

with a policy of unilateral disarmament.

What you are saying, and this is what our friend said from Hampstead,

is that a British Foreign Secretary gets up in the United Nations,

without consultation, mark this, this is a responsible attitude(!),

without telling any members of the Commonwealth,

without concerting with them,

that the British Labour Movement decides unilaterally

that this country contracts out of ALL its commitments and obligations

entered into with other countries and members of the Commonwealth

without consultation at all.

And you call that statesmanship?

I call it an emotional spasm.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Bevan's dismissal of unilateral disarmament

alienated some of his closest allies in the party.

'It was a misty morning on the day of decision

'when early voters went along to do their duty.'

Two years later, Labour suffered its third successive defeat,

in the 1959 General Election.

Labour in general, and Bevan in particular,

seemed out of touch with the mood of the country.

He steeped in all the great debates of the '20s and '30s,

and in the '50s, actually,

all of that is beginning to feel really dated.

The '50s is the age of Cliff Richard, The Affluent Society,

and against that background, you know, Bevan just feels a bit old-fashioned.

And he famously goes to the Labour Party Conference

at the end of the decade and denounces The Affluent Society.

People, as he sees it,

have turned their backs on the great crusade for socialist equality,

basically because they want a better car.

What message are we going to send to the rest of the world?

Are we going to send the message from the great Labour movement,

which is the mother and father of modern democracy and of modern Socialism,

that we, in Blackpool, in 1959,

are going to turn our backs on our principles

because of a temporary unpopularity in a temporarily affluent society?

When we realise that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction,

that we are not beaten,

that we represent the future,

then, when we say it and mean it,

we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led.

APPLAUSE

Within a year of that speech,

Bevan was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

He died on the 6th of July 1960, aged 62.

Over 50 years after his death, Aneurin Bevan is still remembered

as one of the outstanding political figures of the last century.

For many, he is one of the greatest Welshmen of all time.

I think Bevan, more than any other figure in 20th-century Wales,

managed to encapsulate a society

whose material circumstances were so impoverished,

and whose human light was so wonderfully imaginative and dazzling.

What he left Britain with

is probably Labour's greatest and proudest ever accomplishment,

which is the NHS.

And that, you know, is Bevan's legacy.

That this guy, who came from a very, very humble background,

was able to build something

that has meant so much to so many millions of people,

you can't ask for more than that.

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