Word: bevinism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...votes to 60, his colleagues declined to discipline Bevan for attacking the Labor Party's Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin and his tough anti-strike regulation (TIME, May 15). Instead, the party caucus proposed to let the whole thing die in committee. Chuckled unrepentant Nye Bevan: "If the Party executive [ruling committee] can keep it quiet at the [annual] Conference they will. But it'll have to come up ... and the rank and file won't let it pass...
...Fighter. It was totally unlike Ernie Bevin to duck a slambang, winner-take-all fight. Fighting had been his meat & drink when he rose from farmhand to be an unpaid union secretary, then a big-time Laborite, organizer of the 1926 General Strike, and founder of Britain's biggest independent union, the powerful (850,000 members) Transport and General Workers...
Since May 1940, Bevin's hard task had been to take away from labor most of the advantages he and others had won for it. The Labor Minister's enormous powers over 33 million Britons, aged 14 to 64, enabled him to get on with the job, but not to keep his friends. Workers who had once followed him blindly came to distrust his close relationship with Churchill, his warm friendship with such Tories as Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, Minister of State Richard K. Law, Viscount Cranborne, leader of the House of Lords. A mounting rank-&-file revolt...
Through it all, Bevin remained the Ernie of old-harsh-voiced, pontifical, given to great gusts of laughter and oratory. In the House of Commons bar at noontime he continued to drink as long as he had companions, before lunching alone on bread, cheese, beer. Last week Writer-Critic Harold Laski depicted the Bevin of 1944: "Mr. Bevin has never, since he emerged as a trade-union leader of importance, liked criticism, still less opposition. ... He is always certain that he is right. . . . Masterful in temper, obstinate in disposition, accustomed . . . to give orders which must be obeyed...
...Ernie Bevin, such tart criticism was beside the point. His task, getting tougher by the day, was still to keep British labor in battle line, and if possible to save himself while doing...