Word: bevans
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...Majesty's Loyal Opposition. There, down front, sat Clement Attlee's ex-ministers, anxious to criticize but handicapped by the fact that the defense program was, after all, the one they began while in office. On the back benches sat the left-wing rebels led by Aneurin Bevan, spoiling for trouble...
When it came, the Labor Party's pent-up quarrel broke into open mutiny. In the vote on Labor's own pallid motion (combining censure of Churchill with approval of rearmament), Nye Bevan and 39 of his followers stayed stolidly in their seats. Next came the vote on the government's motion approving the Churchill program. Attlee and the bulk of Labor stayed in their seats, abstaining but not voting against. But 40 Bevanites and another 15 Laborites, most of them pacifists, filed into the lobby in open defiance of party orders, to record Noes ("Nyes...
...party regularity, jerkily jumped to his feet, left the House without a word, and took the train to his Buckinghamshire home. But next day he ordered an emergency meeting of all 294 Labor M.P.s for this week, to consider the defiance of his leadership. In rebuttal, brash Nye Bevan demanded and got an emergency session of Labor's executive committee, to be held later in the week. Bevanites are outnumbered on the committee, 23 to 4, but Bevan seemed unconcerned...
Long Shot. London buzzed with talk that Bevan and his key lieutenants would be expelled from the party. Nye Bevan did not still the talk when, four days after the Commons mutiny, he vowed before a Socialist meeting that he would not promise to get in line in the future. The Bevanites would try to persuade the rest of Labor to join them in fighting Toryism, said Bevan. "But if we cannot go on together, we shall go on alone." Presumably neither Nye Bevan nor Clement Attlee wanted a divorce, for such a split might mean a Tory government...
...quite a week for Nye Bevan. He was much too shrewd to try now to wrest party control from Attlee, Morrison & Co.: why split the party when things are going his way? "One wave may shudder the cliff," explained a Bevan strategist, "but it's the steady tide that wears it away...