Word: bevans
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...Bevan, leader of Labor's left wing, which Prime Minister Clement Attlee has tried long and hard to appease, walked out after charging in effect that Attlee was betraying Labor party principles, that the government would split and collapse as Ramsay MacDonald...
Attlee in his reply tried to reduce Bevan's charges to the kind of issue on which Attlee's kind of Laborite feels most at home. From his bed at London's St. Mary's Hospital, where he is undergoing treatment for a duodenal ulcer, Attlee wrote: "I note you have extended the area of disagreement with your colleagues a long way beyond the specific matter to which, as I understood, you had taken objection. I had certainly gathered that if the proposal for imposing charges on dentures and spectacles were dropped, you would have been...
...Wrong." In his note of resignation, Bevan had disagreed with the Prime Minister on much broader issues than false teeth and eyeglasses. Wrote Bevan: "In previous conversations ... I have explained my objections to many features of the budget ... It fails to apportion fairly the burdens of expenditure as between different social classes. It is wrong because it is based upon a base of military expenditure in the coming year which is physically unobtainable without grave extravagance . . . wrong because it is the beginning of the destruction of those social services in which Labor has taken a special pride...
...Bevan acted after a week of soul-searching and intense pressure from many of his left-wing followers. His lifelong friend and political mentor, Archie Lush (until recently Bevan's political agent in Ebbw Vale), visited London and insisted that it was Bevan's duty to save and purify the government's Socialist principles. More pressure came from Bevan's wife Jennie Lee, M.P., his fellow rebel Michael Foot, M.P., and cabinet colleague and co-agitator Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade. Day after Bevan resigned, Wilson handed Attlee his own resignation...
Precipitating the crisis was a shattering attack on the government's budget in the leftist fortnightly Tribune, edited by Jennie Lee and Foot. Into this article was packed every objection Bevan had raised in the party since...