Word: bevins
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...Britain in the gloomy yet still hopeful summer of 1946. The daughter can (and does) document her case with Labor's achievements-some of which are not recognized at home or abroad. In the field of foreign policy, even the Tory father says: "Thank God for Ernie Bevin." He does not mean that Bevin is a mental giant. He senses, as do most Britons, that the Laborites can carry out better than the Tories a certain foreign policy indispensable to Britain's national interests...
That policy falls into three parts: 1) close friendship with the U.S., 2) opposition to Russian expansion, 3) gradual liquidation of the British Empire. Tories and Laborites alike can cooperate with the U.S. But Bevin, the proletarian, can speak up to Russia as Churchill, the aristocrat, could not. When "Ole Ernie" warns of the Soviet danger British workers listen. If the Tories said the same words, British workers would consider them more "imperialist bilge...
...domestic front, which is closer though not less important to Britons, Bevin's counterpart is Herbert Morrison. To him goes the credit and the blame for what Labor did and did not do to raise the lives of Britons above the level most of them had come to consider intolerable. The British electorate, being human, would judge the Labor Party by how much food and clothes and fun Herbert Morrison managed to get for them, rather than by how loudly Ernie Bevin's voice boomed out in international councils...
Both Prime Minister Attlee, whose quiet good sense has impressed the voters, and big-hearted Ernie Bevin are more popular than Morrison. Morrison, however, has a way of stubbornly getting around the Prime Minister. Bevin and Morrison dislike each other, but that does not prevent them from working together. Morrison's present position is somewhat like that of Jimmy Byrnes when he was "Assistant President" of the U.S.-except that Morrison's position is more active and more important. Says he: "Maybe I wasn't born to rule, but I've got used...
...Silver-haired Anthony Eden, handsomer than his pictures make him out to be, rises and wants to know what the Government has done about the Mihailovitch trial in the light of the fact that the British government supported the Chetnik leader for two years. Heavy-set, tough-looking Ernest Bevin lurches to his feet and answers that the British government made certain information known to the Yugoslav government, but could not interfere further in a trial in a sovereign nation. And so the business goes on until the questions are exhausted. Then to the major business...