Foreign News: Disinflated Pouter Pigeon

Minister of Labor Aneurin Bevan blustered at a Labor meeting early this month: “I will never be a member of a government which makes charges on the National Health Service for the patient.” The words were aimed at Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell, who proposed to tamper with Bevan’s onetime baby—the free dentures, spectacles and other medical services which last year cost the Treasury a whopping $1.1 billion.

Last week, among Labor leaders crowding the government’s front bench to support the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his budget address, Bevan was conspicuously absent. Gaitskell had won Prime Minister Clement Attlee to his view that the government must economize drastically for rearmament, even to the point of making cuts in the bounty of the welfare state. Britons could not expect to save their skins, Gaitskell argued, if they considered only their teeth and eyes. He slapped a charge of 50% of cost on dentures and spectacles.

As Gaitskell spoke, Bevan lurked in the shadows behind the Speaker’s chair, hands in pockets, pouting and mumbling to himself over public defeat. When the Chancellor had finished, Bevan strode angrily from the House, drove to the hospital where Clement Attlee is recuperating from duodenal ulcer, let it be known that he would not give up the fight for a completely free health service.

Parliamentary corridors buzzed with rumors that Nye Bevan meant to make good lis threat to resign from the cabinet. Most Tories scoffed; from their opposition benches they needled the Minister of Labor—”the main advocate of waste and extravagance of all forms.” Cracked Conservative M.P. Osbert Peake: “The Chancellor . . . has succeeded where his predecessors all failed; and even if the Chancellor has not yet succeeded in deflating our swollen economy, he has well and ruly disinflated the pouter pigeon of the Treasury dovecote.”