Why not trust the Tories?
By Aneurin Bevan 1944.Bevan was a Labour MP from a poor coal mining family in Wales. He become a leader of the Trade Union movement and was an MP during the Second World War. Following Labour’s ‘landslide’ victory after the war he was made the Minister for Health by Clement Atlee. He built his legacy up by leading through the establishment of the National Health Service.
He publish this in the run up to the general election of 1945 and it is clearly a highly polemical account aimed at exposing the folly of Tories, both past and present and therefore leaves the Labour Party as the only real choice for real social reform. Which is what, by a growing consensus, the British people were looking for.
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 8:42 PM
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The first chapter is a good discussion of the election campaign in 1918. He discredits the Tory party at the time for having simply lied about its social reforming tendencies in order to win over the people’s champion Lloyd George and therefore to win the election. On taking power the Tories however were to renegade on their pledges for a Britain fit for heroes and rather set about pursuing its own, bourgeois, agenda. The great hope that emerges from this election however were the newly empowered mining unions who were not going to take the governments betrayal lying down and hence set about opposing it. That the miners should arise as the heroes of the social reform movement is no surprise because Bevan himself did a lot to lead it.
The second chapter is an account of the coalminers relations with the post-war Coalition government. Particularly concerned their strike actions and the Sankey Coal Commission. Facing demands from the miners union that nationalisation be introduced the Tory government set up the Commission and made gestures towards fulfilling its findings. It found in favour of the miners and the threat of strike action was stopped. But then the Tory establishment went into overdrive and did all it good to discredit the report. The government refused to implement the reports findings and there followed a seven months miner’s strike, which began with a ten day General Strike. The Tory led Coalition lied to the miners and then they defeated the strike. The Tories won.
Note: The 1918 election was known as the Khaki election because of the numbers of military personal eligible to vote.
The third chapter concentrates on the devilish use of lies made by the Tories. Particularly in their choice of campaign slogan after leaving the Coalition government. They chose ‘tranquillity’ and proposed to bring peace to a nation racked with strike that they themselves had caused. He then uses this long chapter to map out the current state of play in British politics and expose the old Tory methods in new clothing currently being deployed. Emphasis is placed on the Tories reluctance to accept the Beveridge report in 1943 despite its widespread popular support amongst both the Labour and Liberal parties, the media and the public. “They contrive to drown the wistful hopes of the people for social security in a torrent of words, specious promises and endless delays”.
The fourth chapter breaks down the governmental white paper on full employment and tears it to pieces. He claims it is based on an underlying principal that private enterprise and market capitalism are destined to break down and cause havoc on human society all in accordance with set cycles. The Tories, so Bevan claims, sees that the only answer is to mobilise the workforce into what is little more than forced manual labour in order to repair the system of capitalism and get it back on track. The workers would become ‘thermostats’ required to down their lives and move off to work camps for the sake of maintaining capitalism. He suggests that this could happen every four years if the cycles in the capitalist system are real.
In the same chapter he moves on to a discussion of the post-war fate of war factories and war production. He puts the Tories in the role of defending the elites and maintaining ‘controlled poverty’ not the ‘abolition of poverty’ since to abolish it would put the power to firmly in the workers hands.
Chapter five sees him make an assault on the governments housing and land policy. Arguing that if land is not nationalised then planning cannot be done properly and the required number of houses will not be built and those that are built will not be built along any rational lines.
Chapter six he moves to really push the knife deep into the Tory character. He claims that in their foreign policy they seek to undermine democracy aboard. What he then refers to is the government’s history of supporting monarchy where it has been a resister to Nazi rule while refusing to work with popular (e.g. socialist) movements. He speaks more generally about the conflicts between poverty, property and democracy. He envisages a fierce battle in which the three cannot co-exist. Democracy is either used to solve poverty by abolishing property or it is itself destroyed by property who fear the power it hands those in poverty. Voting Tory is not just a vote for a lying, landed elite who have always sought to suppress the working man and keep him in poverty, but it also a vote against democracy itself.
A vote for Labour is a vote for prosperity, peace and democracy.
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