The centenary of the birth of Ernest Bevin is being used to tell
us how great was the contribution he made to the welfare of the working
class and indeed, the whole British people.
According to Peter Batty, who was responsible for the ITV documentary
on Bevin’s life, and gave us a blurb in the Observer colour supplement,
Bevin was a colossus, creator of Britain’s biggest union and a superman
of the West who ‘more than anyone else, united the free world against
Stalinism’.
It is not without significance that two of Mr Batty’s authorities
on Bevin are Mr Roy Jenkins and Lord George Brown, well known renegades
from the labour movement, the former having been joined in the Council
of Social Democracy by his biographer Alan Bullock. With what regret must
they conjure up the ghost d the strong man of the British trade union
bureaucracy, loyal servant of British imperialism and staunch defender
of the most anti-socialist policies of the British-American alliance.
For it is not just Bevin who has passed, it is a whole period of the British
labour movement. That is why the social democratic gang was isolated in
the Labour Party and trade unions. They have to be content with a ghost
from the past because no trade union leader today dare follow them, let
alone attempt to take his union to them, whatever his sympathy for these
renegades.
The two decades after the war have gone. Then the Bevin-Attlee or Gaitskell-Deakin
alliance of right wing parliamentarians and trade union bureaucrats ruled
the Labour Party.
The power of that trade union bureaucracy was consolidated during a period
of working class defeats before the war. New generations of combative
and confident workers, in a world of revolutionary change since, have
shaken the foundations of that bureaucracy.
A great deal of nonsense is being spoken and written about Bevin the man,
separated from the social forces in which he lived. Bevin came up as a
national leader of the trade unions out of the upsurge of the working
class in a great wave of industrial struggles that swept Britain before
the First World War. He went through the tough industrial struggles of
organising dockers, carters and casual workers in the West Country and
South Wales.
Capitalism had entered its decline. The explosion of the lower depths
of the working class into trade union organisation shattered the caste
of corrupt, conservative trade union officials which had hardened during
the vast capitalist expansion of the latter half of the previous century.
Syndicalist ideas were rife. The wave of struggle collided with the opportunist
leaders of the newly formed Labour Party who sought to tie it to the Liberals.
The feeling for ‘direct action’ was diffused among the rank
and file. Tom Mann, James Connolly, Jim Lark in and others propagandised
the conception of the socialist society being brought about by ‘direct
action’ and built on industrial unionism.
The best of the young rank and file leaders of this time later broke
through their syndicalism and fought for a communist party. Bevin was
not among them. Bevin spent a little time with the Social Democratic Federation
— a socialist propagandist organisation. Although an indefatigable
organiser of workers into the union and in struggle he was dearly no revolutionary.
He supported ‘direct action’ but within the confines of pure
and simple trade unionism — to get the recognition of the working
class in society on an equal plane with the middle and capitalist class.
Bullock, in his Life and Times of Ernest Bevin adds a comment
to a speech that Bevin made at a conference in 1913 discussing amalgamation
of several carters’, dockers’ and labourers’ unions.
Bevin spoke about unity to give ‘not so much a power to attack as
a power to negotiate... the most valuable thing we have’. Bevin,
comments Bullock, was thus ‘distinct from those who put in the forefront,
the syndicalist argument in favour of trade union unity, the general strike
as a means to the revolutionary seizure of power.’
Trade union membership doubled between 1913 and 1920. As the unions grew
in power Bevin began to identify recognition for himself and the bureaucracy
as recognition for the working class.
Bevin was an empiricist to the core. He hardly ever read a book. In these
early years he, at times, expressed the strength of an upsurge of the
working class but within the limits set by capitalist society. In 1920
he threatened national industrial action against war with Russia. But
it was action to put on pressure. His demands echoed the old Liberal foreign
policy of non-interference, while the rank and file of the labour movement
were moved by international class solidarity with the Russian Revolution.
His union joined the Triple Alliance of miners, transport workers and
railwaymen and he voted on the betrayal of ‘Black Friday’
in 1921. He and other leaders called off a Triple Alliance strike in support
of the miners because the power of workers’ organisations was posed
against the power of the capitalist state. ‘Bevin himself looked
on “Direct Action” as a form of pressure on the Government
rather than a prelude to revolution’ writes Bullock.
The final reckoning for united action as a ‘threat’ or ‘pressure’
was in 1926. The Government refused to budge before the TUC who wanted
negotiations to win some small concessions on the slashing cuts demanded
from the miners. The Government broke off discussions and the TUC was
left with no alternative but to carry out a threat of a General Strike
in support of the locked-out miners. The ruling class, with Churchill
in the van, fought to defeat a revolution. Bevin and the General Council
sought desperately to contain the power of the working class and find
a road to capitulation.
The strike posed a revolution and Bevin pleaded for a mediator. In July
1926 he reported to a union committee how, after a week of strike
— with more and more workers coming out in enthusiastic response
— his aim on the Organisation Committee of the General Council was
‘to try to get such a powerful body of people — commercial,
religious and otherwise — to appoint a committee which would have
acted as a mediatory committee between us and the Government’.
Bevin was part of the treacherous capitulation which ended the strike
and left the miners to fight alone for another six months.
Within a year later union membership had fallen by Haifa million. The
working class suffered the results of the 1926 defeat in victimisations,
and slashing attacks on wages and conditions. They went through the crisis,
slump and mass unemployment of the l930s. Trade union membership in 1934
was half of what it had been ten years previously. Bevin and the trade
union bureaucracy clamped themselves more firmly on the working class.
Bevin was in the vanguard of tying the unions to the employers and the
state.
Such a man, tough, ruthless, with no socialist principles, one who had
already shown his ability in dealing with rank and file opposition in
his own union, was the very one needed when the Labour leaders rallied
to the assistance of British capitalism in 1940. Only by using the labour
and trade union leaders who could exploit the workers’ widespread
hatred of fascism as the destroyer of working class organisation, could
the British ruling class secure the necessary war effort.
So Bevin was given the job of introducing control of labour and conscription
of women to industry, including nurses up to 60 years of age and cotton
operatives up to 55. Women were compulsorily transferred from one end
of the country to the other; workers were forbidden to leave their jobs;
workers were imprisoned for absenteeism or striking. At one time Bevin
made an order that boys of 16-18 could be ordered from the pit head to
work down the mine. Against widespread opposition in mining areas he introduced
his ‘Bevin boy’ scheme by which apprentices and other youth
were conscripted to mining work.
In 1944 unofficial strikes of miners spread until a quarter of a million
miners were out. There were a number of engineering and other strikes.
To suppress the discontent Bevin wanted to introduce a Regulation with
severe penalties for ‘incitement’ to strike. To set the atmosphere
for it there was an orchestrated witch hunt in the press against the Trotskyists.
They were accused of being the ‘hidden hands’ behind the strikes.
In preparation for a widespread attack on the rights of all workers the
rights of revolutionaries were first attacked. Trotskyists were arrested
under the Trades Disputes Act of 1927, accused of conspiring to bring
about the apprentices strike against conscription into the mines. The
Trades Dispute Act had been passed as a punitive measure against workers’
action after the 1926 strike. Bevin and other leaders of the trade unions
and Labour Party were pledged to fight for its repeal!
Regulation 1AA, which Bevin now pushed through, meant that anyone found
guilty of ‘declaring’, ‘instigating’ or ‘inciting’
any other person to take part in a strike in ‘essential’ services,
could be sentenced to penal servitude for up to five years or fined up
to £500— or both.
The Regulation met all round opposition among trade unionists. When the
Regulation came before the House of Commons, only 56 out of 165 Labour
MPs voted for it. Twenty-three voted against and the rest either abstained
or were absent. The Parliamentary Labour Party refused Bevin’s demand
that Aneurin Bevan should be expelled for opposing Regulation 1AA.
POST-WAR BETRAYAL
In the closing stages of the war Bevin supported completely the attempts
of British imperialism to establish the old pre-war corrupt, dictatorial
and imperialist regimes in Europe and Asia. He played his most despicable
role in assisting Churchill and the British ruling class in Greece.
The Greek organisation EAM — a coalition of seven parties including
the Liberals and the Communist Party — had the mass support of Greek
workers and peasants. ELAS, its military organisation, was the main resistance
to the German occupation. The mass of the people were opposed to the return
of the monarchy and the pre-war dictatorship. Eighty-five per cent of
the Greek army had been interned by the British in Egypt because of its
support for EAM.
British capitalism was determined to re-impose the rule of Greek landowners
and capitalists under King George of the Hellenes. The British Military
Government demanded the disarming of ELAS. Workers and peasants refused
to give up their weapons while royalist officers retained their arms.
In Athens on December 3rd 1944 there was a peaceful demonstration in support
if EAM and in protest at royalist demonstrations in the previous days.
The demonstration was led by women and children. British troops fired
into the head of the march and killed 15 and wounded 148. A General Strike
broke out throughout Athens.
In Britain, the rank and file of the trade union movement reacted with
anger. Civil war began in Greece. A section of Ghurka troops in the British
army deserted to ELAS. The Observer prophesied ‘serious
labour trouble’ and said that even if victory over ELAS was won
it ‘might break the coalition’. Bevin and other labour bureaucrats
worked might and main to prevent a condemnation of the coalition government
being passed at the special Labour Party conference which was to be held
later in December.
Bullock in his biography of Bevin writes:
To avoid the danger of the party conference passing a direct vote
of censure on the Government and its labour members, the NEC put forward
a resolution calling for an armistice, without delay and the resumption
of talks to establish a Provisional National Government in Greece.
Bevin lined up the block votes to carry the resolution and Bullock remarks
that Churchill never forgot the debt he owed Bevin for this.
The Soviet bureaucracy pressurised the Greek Communist Party to accept
an armistice. Churchill had visited Moscow the previous October and got
the assurance from Stalin that Greece would be in Britain’s sphere
of influence.
Fifty thousand British troops remained in Greece. Workers and peasants
were disarmed. By 1947 there were 14,000 Greek political prisoners living
on the penal islands, half starved, without sufficient fuel, bedding and
water. Court martials were working continuously, sentencing to death civilians
as well as soldiers.
It was Bevin’s ‘belief that foreign and defence policy, unlike
domestic policy, should not be a matter for party politics’ wrote
Bullock in The Observer of March 8th in an article on Bevin.
Bevin clearly put the imperialist content of this belief at the special
Labour Party conference of 1944, when he supported the repression in Greece.
‘The British Empire’ he said, ‘whether we like it or
not, cannot abandon its position in the Mediterranean. It is impossible
for it to do so.’
It was the rapidly growing hostility to capitalist policies that ejected
Bevin and the other labour leaders out of the War Cabinet. Eden, in his
memoirs, reports a conversation with Bevin in June 1944 about continuing
the coalition in the immediate post war period. The growing opposition
to the political truce and to foreign and domestic policy of the Government
and the massive desire for a change made it impossible for Bevin to fight
for his plan of a continuation of the coalition.
When the Labour Party swept the polls in July 1945, Bevin became Foreign
Minister. Attlee appointed him at the suggestion of George VI. Mark Stephens
tells us that Bevin was very intimate with King George VI. Is this supposed
to impress T&G members? Stephens quotes the king, writing to his brother
about the new Labour Government: ‘My new government is not too easy
and the people are rather difficult to talk to. Bevin is very good and
tells me everything that is going on.’
We find here that the ‘tough’ trade union leader who, we
are told, was a champion of ‘his people’, has a deep and essential
servility to the rulers of society and their institutions. The Jimmy Thomases
and the Ernie Bevins love to drop an aitch in front of the monarch —
but as one of his most loyal, hand-kissing subjects. The same loyalty
and attention, of course, is not given to their trade union members. It
would be quite against British tradition and constitution for workers
to expect their representatives to treat them like they treat the rich,
unelected monarch, and tell them ‘everything that is going on’
in the Government!
For a decade after the war ‘Bevinism’ was a dirty word in
the British labour movement. Bevin was the arch defender of the interests
of British imperialism and the alliance with America’s rulers. He
was one of the leading protagonists of the cold war.
SAVING CAPITALISM
Bevin is reported to have said during the war that he wanted to see a
‘Peoples’ Peace’. But what sort of peace did he and
the labour leaders fight for? With their help and that of the Stalinists
in Europe the revolutionary wave after the war was defeated, workers and
peasants disarmed and the old capitalist rulers firmly re-established.
With those betrayals the choice of socialism or barbarism gained a new
dimension — for the capitalism they saved now developed nuclear
weapons. Bevin and Co. saw their task at the end of the war to maintain
the basic capitalist imperialist relations existing in Britain and the
Empire at the beginning of the war. Any role for the ‘peoples’
interests’ in the peace came about when imperialism was forced to
retreat before the strength in struggle of the colonial people and the
working class.
There is the myth that the participation of Bevin in the war-time government
and the presence of trade union leaders in war-time government committees
represented a big step in the upward climb of trade unions to a powerful
place in society. Here, things are turned on their heads. Bevin did not
represent the working class in the council chambers of capitalism. He
represented capitalism inside the trade unions. In his forward in Mark
Stephen’s book, Moss Evans declares:
‘Ernest Bevin both developed and exercised power on behalf
of ordinary working people for a long time.’ The truth is that Ernest
Bevin exercised poor which came from the working class, but he exercised
it on behalf of the capitalist class. That is the meaning of what Bullock
tells us when he writes that in the War Cabinet Bevin put ‘loyalty
to the coalition before party interest, to the anger of not a few members
of the Labour Party’.
Bevin created a bureaucratic apparatus in his union and manipulated it
through all the period of defeats before the war. ‘The laws of history
will prove stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus’ wrote Trotsky.
The laws of history are expressed by the working class in struggle. Those
struggles have already shaken Bevin’s apparatus. Soon after he died,
the break of 10,000 dockers to the ‘blue union’ on the docks
of Merseyside, Manchester and Hull blew it open. In the following decade,
the growth of militancy and organisation of new workers compelled further
alterations in the relations in the union. Officials could no longer bludgeon
their members and declare in the words of one docks official of the early
fifties that he didn’t care what members though of him. He had his
job to think of first and if he had to choose between being popular with
them or standing well with the high officials, he would not hesitate to
choose the latter (The Dock Worker. University of Liverpool Department
of Social Science. 1954)
A new type of leader came up in the T&G in line with the times. The
new leaders — Cousins, Jones and Moss Evans — adjusted to
the situation with left talk.
Moss Evans in his foreword to Mark Stephen’s book praises Bevin
for ‘pioneering what today we might call “tripartism”,
demanding and winning in later years a recognised role for the voice of
the working people in the nation’s affairs’.
The voice of the working people is expressed through its own power and
its own organisation. Moss Evans is expressing the cry of the bureaucrat
who wants to hear his voice in the councils of capitalism and take his
turn in the NEDC. It is the cry of the ‘alternative strategist’
of the TUC who complain that ‘tripartism’ has broken down
and call on the working class to protest that the Tory Government will
not take them into partnership.
April
1981
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