Word: bevans
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Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan, Labor's Health Minister, was in a reminiscent mood last week. But memories of a poverty-haunted childhood in Tredegar, South Wales, left the Minister of Health far from mellow. "No amount of cajolery and no attempts at ethical or social seduction," he told a meeting of Laborites at Manchester, "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 . . ." "What is Toryism," he asked later, "but organized spivery...
...professional trick," snorted the Tory Daily Express at these outbursts. "The more the Tories hate Mr. Bevan, the higher will be his prestige in his party." Just the same, Labor Party leaders who knew they had to woo former Tories in order to stay in power were appalled by the Bevan outburst (see cut). On Bevan's Chelsea house someone painted: "Vermin Villa-home of a loudmouthed...
Unchastened, Bevan put a restless foot back in his nimble mouth. Opening a maternity hospital at Holyhead, he said that men of Celtic fire were needed to bring about great reforms like the new health service. That was why, he explained, Welshmen were put in charge instead of "the bovine and phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons." How Bevan's Labor associates, including Anglo-Saxons Attlee, Morrison and Bevin, liked that one was not revealed. Unphlegmatic Anglo-Saxon Winston Churchill, however, put his head down and charged. Said he: "We speak of the Minister of Health-but ought we not rather...
...doctors have many objections to the new act. Basically, they fear complete state control of medicine. And the doctors do not trust Bevan. In medical terms, he is a "corrected sinistral": left-handed as a child, he developed a stammer when elders forced him to be righthanded. He cured the stammer, relapses only when he is excited; but the doctors think that his politics move steadily leftward...
...spite of the no-confidence vote, Bevan was still confident that he had a good chance of corralling enough doctors to make the scheme work on schedule. He holds a powerful pounds & pence goad: the panel system ends July 5 and is superseded by the new act. Doctors will miss its steady income. They will still be free to practice privately, but they will have trouble finding many Britons willing to pay extra...