Aneurin Bevan was born on November 15th, 1897. As Health Minister in the 1945 postwar Atlee Labour government, he was instrumental in founding and shaping Britain’s National Health Service.
He was born in Tredegar, a Welsh town where 90% of the population relied on the coal mines for their income. He left school at 13 and worked as a miner in his teens, involving himself in union politics. At the age of 32 he was elected as MOP for Ebbw Vale, a safe Labour seat. He was a firebrand, overcoming a boyhood stammer to become an eloquent orator, and made passionate speeches against Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. He was expelled from the Labour Party at one stage for sharing platforms and publications with the Communist Party.
He was highly critical of Churchill’s wartime government, saying he would have preferred a class war to a world war. He said of the 1945 postwar election:
“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, and twenty-five years of Labour Government."
When Labour won, he was appointed Minister of Health and set about creating a totally tax-funded healthcare system. He faced opponents within his own party and from the medical profession, and had to make concessions such as allowing doctors to keep their private practices. He famously said that to get the deal through, "I stuffed their mouths with gold." The Act was passed in 1946, nationalizing over 2,500 hospitals within the UK.
Following the party’s defeat in 1951, Bevan’s influence declined, though he led a group of hard-left MPs called ‘Bevanites.’ He was beaten by Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership when Atlee quit, though he later served briefly as deputy leader. He remained controversial, saying:
“No attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”
The Tories responded by forming ‘vermin clubs’ and proudly wearing furry vermin badges. His colleague, Herbert Morrison, said the speech “had done much more to make the Tories work and vote than Conservative Central Office could have done.” It was reckoned to have cost Labour more than two million votes.
Bevan was part of a government that was ruinous for Britain. Central planning and nationalization simply didn’t work, whatever socialist theory might say. No other country has copied Britain’s National Health Service, which still faces crises every year. Bevan’s legacy is thus one of failure. It might have been well-intentioned failure, but it was ideologically driven rather than experienced based. History shows us that when you ignore the real world in order to construct fantasy worlds, that real world has a habit of coming back to clobber you.