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Aneurin Bevan was the Labour Party's Health Minister after their electoral victory in 1945. Aneurin Bevan was more commonly known as Nye.
Aneurin Bevan was born on November 15th, 1897 in Tredegar, Wales. His father was a miner and Bevan was one of ten children. Life was hard for any mining family then and the Bevan family was no exception. Bevan left school at the age of thirteen and like his father became a coal miner. He joined the Tytryst Colliery. Support for the Independent Labour Party was strong amongst South Wales miners and Bevan joined the South Wales branch of the South Wales Miners' Federation. He became an active trade unionist and aged just nineteen, he became the head of his local Miners' Lodge. The management of his colliery saw him as a troublemaker and using a tenuous excuse, sacked him. However, the Miners' Federation took up his cause and the mine owners were deemed to have acted illegally and to have sacked him as a result of victimisation. Bevan was given back his job.
In 1919, Bevan won a place at the Central Labour College in London. Here, he developed a detailed understanding of Marxism. However, when he returned to Tredegar in 1921, he found that he had no job as the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company refused to employ him. He had a troubled four years - he gained work at the Bedwellty Colliery but it closed down after he had been there ten months and he spent one year out of work. Then in 1925 his father died of a disease that was to kill or impair many miners - pneumoconiosis.
In 1926, Bevan became a paid union official. He was paid £5 a week and took on the position in the lead up to the General Strike of 1926. Bevan quickly became one of the leaders of the South Wales Miners and helped to organise food and strike pay for the miners. He also raised money for men who were to be on strike for six months. Bevan gained a reputation as a loyal supporter of the working class who would give as many hours in the day as were needed to support, in this case, the miners of South Wales.
His role was recognised by the Labour Party and in 1929, he was the official Labour Party candidate for Ebbw Vale in the general election of that year. He easily won a place in the House of Commons.
In Parliament, Bevan gained a reputation for expressing his support of the working class and condemning those in Parliament who he felt were anti-working class. He maintained his seat in the 1931 general election where he stood as a Labour candidate after criticising Ramsey MacDonald for his part in the National Government. The power of the Labour Party was overwhelmed in Parliament by the sheer number of MP's who belonged to the National Government and in the 1930's the Labour Party had little impact in Parliament.
Bevan voiced his support for those who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War and argued that Britain should do a lot more to help the Republican cause. Bevan became an active member of the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. In 1936, he joined the board of 'Tribune', a new socialist newspaper. Bevan was briefly expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 for agitating for a united socialist front in Britain which was to include the Communist Party. In November 1939, he was readmitted to the party after promising to not do anything that was against the party's declared policies.
Bevan barely toned down his beliefs in World War Two. However, he did support those who believed that Winston Churchill should be the nation's leader in war - after spending the 1930's condemning Churchill as an enemy of the working class. Bevan criticised war time censorship and internment as laid out in Defence Regulation 18B. He also pushed for a front in Western Europe to take some of the pressure off of Russia. Bevan also called for the coal mines to be nationalised. To some, Bevan did not fit in with the spirit of support for a nation at war and Churchill called him the 'Minister for Disease'.
In the lead up to the 1945 election, Bevan showed his true colours.
"We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders. We enter this campaign at this general election, not merely to get rid of the Tory majority. We want the complete political extinction of the Tory Party."
Bevan truly believed that the Labour Party had the opportunity to create a better society after the end of the war. After Labour's handsome victory in 1945, Clement Atlee gave Bevan the position of Minister of Health. Bevan steered through Parliament the National Health Service. Opposed by the British Medical Association, the NHS came into being on July 5th, 1948. Britain's 2,688 hospitals in England and Wales now offered free diagnosis and treatment of ills. The services of GP's and dentists were also free unless people wanted to go private. The NHS, along with the Welfare State, was one of the most important developments in post-war Britain as it helped those who could least afford to help themselves. The whole ideology behind the NHS clearly fitted in with what Bevan believed in - helping the working class.
In Atlee's 1950-51 government, Bevan was Minister of Labour. However, he resigned from the Cabinet in protest at prescription charges being introduced for dental care and spectacles to help fund the NHS that was already absorbing vast sums of money. As a back-bench MP, Bevan rallied around him left-wing Labour MP's. These became known as 'Bevanites'. They criticised Atlee's leadership and in 1955, the whip was removed from Bevan for a month.
In 1955, Atlee retired from the Commons. In the ensuing leadership battle for the Labour Party, Bevan stood against Hugh Gaitskell and Herbert Morrison. Gaitskell won the contest and made Bevan shadow Colonial Secretary and in 1956, Shadow Foreign Secretary.
In 1959, Bevan was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. However, he was suffering from cancer and died in 1960, aged 62.
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