What would ‘Labour’s Churchill’ make of modern politics?
One wonders what Ernest Bevin, giant of Britain’s trades union movement, warrior of the Second World War, and early Eurosceptic, would make of today’s Labour Party. A patriot, he stood by Churchill’s side through our darkest hour. A democrat, he hated fascism and communism equally. A practical man, he loathed the treachery of Ramsay MacDonald, the weakness of George Lansbury, and the self-indulgence of Aneurin Bevan.
It is difficult to imagine Bevin would have any time at all for the revolutionaries and wrong ’uns that have recently dominated Labour. This is obviously why Andrew Adonis has written a biography of the man he calls “Labour’s Churchill”.
A compelling biography requires a compelling subject, and Bevin is certainly that. Raised in poverty by a single mother, “Ernie” rose to become Britain’s Foreign Secretary. “There were only two posts in the Foreign Office he could have held,” went the joke, “Foreign Secretary and doorkeeper.”
Bevin might have been a doorkeeper, had it not been for his ferocious intellect and unstoppable drive. An autodidact, in his 20s he attended evening classes in Bristol.
His oratorical skills – honed by preaching in nonconformist chapels – were what first catapulted Bevin to national prominence. Amid industrial turmoil after the First World War, he represented the dockers in a pay dispute in the Royal Courts of Justice. Giving evidence, Bevin produced plates of the miserably shrivelled food the dockers could provide for their families. To show that the bosses had things rather better, his performance culminated with the presentation of the lunch menu from the Savoy Grill. Bevin won the case, and a nickname: the Dockers’ KC.
Thereafter, Bevin’s rise was unstoppable. He founded the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which later became the biggest union in the West. Ever the democrat, he faced down communists within the labour movement. His role in the general strike – “last in and first out” as Adonis puts it – won him further criticism from the Left. But Bevin was always interested in practical change, not glorious failure.
The Thirties were fallow years for Labour, with the party split after the defection of Ramsay MacDonald and his Chancellor, Philip Snowden, to the national government. But Bevin did not let the decade go to waste. He got to know John Maynard Keynes and supported nationalisation and a planned economy. He helped install Clement Attlee as Labour leader in 1935 and became his most trusted lieutenant.
And then war came. In a labour movement as split as the country between pacifists, appeasers and those who would stand up to Hitler, Bevin was consistently in the latter camp. When Chamberlain fell, Bevin was the Labour figure Churchill wanted most in his government, and with good reason. As Minister for Labour, Bevin mobilised more of Britain’s population, for industrial and military purposes, than totalitarian Italy and Germany.
Having helped to win the war, Bevin played a central role in leading Britain from the ruins. After Labour’s victory in 1945, Attlee sent him to the Foreign Office, where his officials loved telling tales of their rougharound-the-edges Foreign Secretary. When one used the phrase, “mutatis mutandis”, Bevin replied, “please do not write in Greek. I have never learned it.”
But Bevin was much loved on King Charles Street. He thwarted Stalin’s ambitions in Western Europe, ensured the emergence of an independent West Germany, and saved West Berlin from Soviet blockade. He bound a hesitant United States into the defence of Europe, and helped found Nato. He demanded an independent nuclear deterrent with “the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”.
Such patriotism is rare on the modern Left. For this reason alone,
Adonis is right to identify Bevin as an inspiration to contemporary Labour reformers. But Adonis unwittingly reveals how hard change will be. He criticises Bevin for his British imperialism and attitude to gender equality, for example, without accepting that neither belief was unusual in Bevin’s time. Judging history by modern standards is, as we have seen with statues and calls to “decolonise” the curriculum, profoundly unpopular with Labour’s lost voters.
Adonis criticises Bevin for failing to use the British protectorate in Palestine to create a two-state solution for Jews and Arabs. But whatever Bevin’s failure, the violence of the last seven decades cannot be laid at his door alone. The United Nations gave the Palestinians their chance for statehood in 1947. Tragically, their leaders were more determined to destroy Israel than build a state of their own. But such honest assessments are impossible in today’s Labour Party.
Most tellingly, Adonis attacks Bevin for his scepticism about the 1950 Schuman Plan and Europe’s early steps towards economic and political union. But was Bevin so wrong about that? The European Coal and Steel Community gave rise to the European Union, confirming British fears about a loss of sovereignty and supranational government.
Just as Bevin chose not to sign up to Schuman, 70 years later many Labour voters chose to leave the EU. If Adonis wants Labour to find its way back to power, it will need to respect those Brexit voters and embrace British independence from Brussels. Anything else, as Ernie might have said, “my people will not stand”.
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Bevin loathed the treachery of Ramsay Macdonald and Nye Bevan’s self-indulgence