Foreign News: Room at the Fireside

At 18, having spent almost half his life in Welsh coal mines, Aneurin Bevan quarreled with his family, decided to seek his fortune in the big world. Coming downstairs, through the warm kitchen with the family seated around a coal fire, young Bevan halted at the door. It was snowing outside. As he hesitated, his father put an arm around his shoulder and said: “Come back, son, there’s always a seat at the fireside.” Since that day, Nye Bevan’s fiery arrivals and quarrelsome departures have played a spectacular part in British Labor politics. In the last two years he has known to the full what it is like to be out side in the cold. But last week a fatherly British Labor Party threw its arm about the burly shoulders of Rebel Bevan, now 58, and gave him a roomy seat at its broad fireside—a seat second only to that held by Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell, 50.

Thousands cheered at the Labor Party Conference at seaside Blackpool when a teller recited the vote that made Bevan party treasurer (by a margin of 274,000 over Candidate George E. Brown). The truth was that the cheers were more for a party decision than for ruddy, white-thatched Nye Bevan himself. Said a Mine Union leader: “We thought he’d be better cornered in office than left wild outside.” Sighed a delegate: “Phew, unity at last!”

Gathering Strength. The question, however, was how long Bevan, now in a position of greater power than he has ever had before, intended to let party unity be his byword. At a press conference, the returned prodigal said it was too early to think about challenging the party leadership, but he added blandly: “One never rules out any possibility about the future.” Bevan also had an answer to the second question worrying the British: Is Labor swinging left? The Labor Party Conference had shown, he said, “a very substantial degree of radical temper—very much more so than in recent years. It looks as if the movement is gathering strength for another quite rapid surge forward.”

Labor’s “radical temper” was shown principally in two policy directives: 1) a housing policy which commits the party to municipal ownership of 6,000,000 rent-controlled houses, and 2) a program for greater equality which commits it to a capital-gains tax and an attempt at cutting or raising all incomes in Britain to one level. But the Labor Party has not officially revived the issue of nationalizing more industries, which Bevan favors, nor did it decide that public, i.e., private, schools should be abolished, a step long advocated by Bevan. The conference also demanded abolition of all forms of race discrimination and segregation in Britain and her colonies, and laid down proposals for the eventual termination of British colonialism. In sum, the party, while veering leftward from the course set by Former Leader Clement Attlee, was still traveling to the right of its rugged radical.

Taking a Bow. As if to temper Nye Bevan’s satisfaction, the conference in its later stages turned into a triumph for the moderate Gaitskell. After ten months of leadership (the leader chosen by the party’s 277 M.P.s), Gaitskell faced the whole party for the first time. The delegates were cool toward him in the beginning, but warmed to the speech, delivered with confidence and fervor, with which Gaitskell wound up a later debate. The cheers kept on until Gaitskell rose and took a bow—a tribute almost never tendered at Laborite conventions. Raising a hand, and with shining face and vibrant voice, he cried: “Thank you, comrades, we take that as a pledge between us.” The conference rose and gave him its heart. There was no doubt about the meaning of that pledge: Gaitskell was the man they wanted for their leader.