Letter: Bevan and the Bomb (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In the November issue (of the Socialist Standard) I discovered a comment uncharacteristically shallow and pithy. The aforementioned comment was superimposed on a picture of Labour's new leader Neil Kinnock. I quote:

  Now how did Nye ditch the nut-cutlet brigade? Oh yes. “We cannot send a British foreign secretary- naked into the conference chamber . . ."

No one can deny that Bevan actually uttered those words but if you are to condemn him, you must first understand his reasoning. I hope the quotation below from a letter he sent to a close friend after the Brighton speech enlightens you:
  . . . I am afraid that my Brighton speech has been misunderstood but I suppose I must accept most of the responsibility.

   I do not regard the possession of the hydrogen bomb by Great Britain as making the slightest contribution to peace or to our security, so the argument is not for, or against, Britain possessing the hydrogen bomb. My case is a little different. It rests upon the argument that if we unilaterally reject the bomb, then we are at the same time rejecting all the alliances and obligations in which this country has become involved, either rightly or wrongly. We could not keep an alliance with countries possessing the bomb and yet repudiate it ourselves. When I spoke of Britain going naked into the conference chamber, I was not thinking of the bomb at all. I had in mind the fact that without substituting anything for them in the meantime we should have made a shambles of all our treaties, commitments, obligations and rejected our friends, and this without consulting them. . .

He later goes on to say:

  I am convinced that we must so conduct our affairs as to bring about the abolition, not only of the British bomb, but the American and the Russian as well. . .

Clearly Bevan's opinion is a reasoned analysis not simply an attempt to "ditch the nut-cutlet brigade".
Interestingly in your picture Kinnock was holding a copy of In Place of Fear, which is a book which clearly expresses Bevan's socialism—a socialism of Marxist and Syndicalist origins. As a socialist I hope Mr Kinnock remains a Bevanite for if he does there is hope for all socialists in Britain. Perhaps it would be wiser if the SPGB was not so far removed from the organised labour movement, and was to recognise the common interests that it has with that movement? To claim to represent the working class and to then reject organised labour is untenable.

A. J. Walker 

Warwick University 

Coventry

Reply:
Aneurin Bevan was probably the subject of more myths than most politicians in recent times. One of these concerned his attitude to nuclear weapons and he himself exploded the myth in his speech at the 1957 Labour Party conference in Brighton, when he opposed a resolution calling on the party to renounce the testing or manufacture of nuclear weapons in any form whatsoever. This shocked some of his supporters (the "nut-cutlet brigade”), because they saw it as a great betrayal. In fact it was nothing of the kind.

At the time Bevan, with his history of "left- wing" dissent, was linked with the growing alarm at the results of nuclear tests and at the prospects of a nuclear war:

  More and more it did appear—due chiefly no doubt to the Christmas Island explosions earlier in the year—that the strange numbness which seemed to afflict the national consciousness on the subject was being removed, and Bevan himself had played a principal part in the achievement (Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, p.566).

It is true that some of Bevan's actions and speeches could have been interpreted in that way; they certainly had an appeal to the disarmers’ lobby. In March 1955 he had demanded of Attlee that the British forces would not be the first to drop an H-bomb (Hugh Gaitskell, Philip Williams, p.494). During the 1955 election he had declared himself “profoundly opposed" to the bomb's manufacture (The British General Election 1955, D.E. Butler). In April 1957 he still pursued the same line: “I can see no good purpose at all in Britain also arming herself with that useless weapon” (Foot, op. cit. p.552). At the miners' gala in Cardiff in June 1957 he urged that street demonstrations might be necessary if the government failed to act. Inevitably, in that year before the formation of CND, there developed an assumption in some circles that Bevan would be in the leadership of any movement aimed at the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But anyone who thought like that was overlooking some other, very important, facts in Bevan's record. To begin with, he was in the Labour Cabinet which had given the go-ahead for the manufacture of a British atomic bomb and he gave the project his active support (Williams. op. cit. p.454). According to the inveterate disarmer, Peggy Duff (Left, Left, Left, p.70) a few days before his demand to Attlee about first use of the H-bomb he had actually encouraged Richard Crossman to support the making of the bomb. Crossman agrees with this interpretation. recording that for Bevan ". . . not the H-bomb, but our strategy and foreign policy were the real issues ... I was extremely impressed by his argument that public opinion was not ripe for (opposition to manufacture of the bomb)" (Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 4 March 1955).

The best that could be said for Bevan's record on nuclear weapons, then, was that it was inconsistent and opportunistic. When it came to his speech at Brighton, he was in the position of a future Labour Foreign Secretary (with high hopes of soon becoming the real thing, for the Conservatives were still in disarray after Suez and before Macmillan's careful reconstruction of their electoral support). Bevan’s inconsistency, in a more critical gathering, might have been embarrassing for him. He dealt with the problem by arguing the case he had put to Crossman—and to many others for some time— that nuclear weapons were inseparable from capitalism at large with its world-wide conflicts and its diplomacy. To abolish British weapons, immediately and unilaterally, was not reconcilable with the role of the British ruling class in those conflicts. Disarmament, although desirable. would therefore have to be postponed—which was. of course, the sort of argument any Conservative would have accepted.

At the pre-conference Labour Party NEC on 30 September 1957 Bevan attacked the unilateralists' resolution:

  . . . the full implication of accepting this resolution would mean the dismantling of international alliances and commitments, dismaying the Commonwealth and reducing Britain to complete negation in the councils of the world (Foot. op. cit. p.570).

It would, he said, be a mistake “. . .to take all the cards out of the hand of Labour's next Foreign Secretary" (Williams, op. cit. p.456), a metaphor which was transformed, a few days later into the plea not to send him:

. . . naked into the conference chamber. Able to preach sermons, of course; he could make good sermons. But action of that sort is not necessarily the way in which you take the menace of this bomb from the world (Conference Report, p. 181).

So it is clear that the argument quoted by Mr. Walker represents Bevan’s attitude at the time of that conference. One effect of it. of course, was to publicly cement the alliance between Bevan and Gaitskell. his sworn enemy of recent times; it also assured him his place as the next Labour Foreign Secretary and even, had he lived, perhaps Prime Minister. It was the unilateralists, angry and bewildered, who had got it wrong; they had fallen for the myth and ignored the reality. Peggy Duff (p.71) saw it more clearly: ". . . he was not reneging on the left. He merely stayed where he was, and maintained what had always been his position". A couple of years before, Crossman also had got it right: ". . . he had no moral scruples about the H- bomb . . .” (Diaries, 7 March 1955).

That leaves us with the more important question: does it matter? The Bevan myth is that he was a special, unusual sort of politician, a man of principle who could have made our lives immeasurably better. The reality, as his record on nuclear weapons shows, is that there was nothing exceptional about him as a political leader, trying to run British capitalism in the interests of the ruling class and at the same time keeping his support among the working class. Of course this caused Bevan, with his background as an impoverished miner and his following of starry-eyed labour fanatics, a few problems, which he could usually obscure by application of his agile brain and swift tongue. So he made countless fluent speeches to persuade workers that it is possible to run capitalism without its essential problems like poverty and class conflict, war and weapons of war. In this he was no more consistent (or honest?) than the rest.

These characteristics are also evident in Bevan’s book In Place of Fear, where he describes his ideas on "socialism” in typical confusion and irrelevance:

  The philosophy of democratic Socialism is essentially cool in temper . . . Because it knows that all political action must be a choice between a number of possible alternatives it eschews all absolute prescriptions and final, decisions . . . It struggles against the evils that flow from private property, yet realises that all forms of private property are not necessarily evil (p.169).

For Bevan. the way to "socialism" was through pettyfogging reforms and readjustments in taxes and wages policy. He favoured the "mixed economy" — some concerns being owned by the state and others remaining in private hands (Foot. op. cit. p.37l), so even his support for the capitalist reform of nationalisation was not consistent. What he did not stand for was the socialist, Marxist, alternative to capitalism — a democratic revolution in which the world’s workers will overthrow the capitalist system, dispossess the minority owning class and transform the basis of society from private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution to communal ownership.

Socialism will be a classless, moneyless society and to that Bevan was opposed. He was no more than a typical politician, seeking power from non-socialists on a programme of reforms, then trying to wriggle out of the backtracking and intellectual confusion which this inevitably causes. He wriggled, with a combination of an overbearing personality and telling oratory, rather more effectively than most, which does a lot to explain the myths that still surround him and which entrance Mr. Walker for one.

When Bevan died capitalism was as strife-torn and insecure as ever; two years after his death we were almost plunged into a nuclear war by the Cuban missile crisis. There was no more to hope for in that particular Welsh wizard than in any other political trickster.

Finally: the Socialist Party of Great Britain does not claim to "represent" the working class, who at present overwhelmingly support capitalism. We stand for working class interests — the establishment of socialism — which is a very different matter. As the socialist movement grows so it will come to represent the working class. Mr. Walker does not say what he means by “organised labour" but if the term means the Labour Party and, where they are in combination with the Labour party, the trade union movement, then socialists are opposed to them. Their policies and actions are opposed to working class interests and are aimed at the maintenance of capitalism. Socialists — and indeed anyone who is concerned for workers’ interests — must be hostile to them.

Editors