Word: bevins
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...Weakening." Ernie Bevin had sat up all night pondering his speech. He had seized a moment when serious troubles plagued Britain's foreign spheres. Smartly and swiftly he had picked up a cue dropped by his predecessor, Anthony Eden, in the House of Commons debate the day before. Eden had said that atomic weapons and "every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty." Eden's counsel: "Abate our present ideas of sovereignty [and] take the sting out of nationalism." His conclusion: the veto power of the Big Five of the United Nations Organization...
...Bevin went far beyond this cue, but in doing so he gave UNO its strongest stimulant in many months. Bevin insisted that Britain stood wholeheartedly behind the United Nations Organization and would utilize it-"stretch it to the limit of its capacity from the security point of view." He added: "There must be no weakening of the institutions which were built at San Francisco...
...effect was instantaneous and evidently deep. The packed galleries and M.P.s of all parties roundly cheered Ernie Bevin. Keen, young Michael Foot, Labor's most pungent pamphleteer, who had also been up all night preparing a blast at Bevin, tore up his manuscript.* Laborites, Tories, Liberals were apparently of one mind: this way lay hope, at least, for a world afraid of blowing itself to smithereens. The British press showed no excitement...
...Politician Bevin did not put all his eggs in one Utopian basket. He well knows that it is the governments of three nations, not the peoples of the world, that hold 90% of the world's military power; that the present charter of the United Nations was drafted in painful consciousness of that hard fact...
...Bevin had his British anchor to windward; he was firm about Britain's role in western Europe: "I cannot help it if people have groundless suspicion. . . . But I must. . . go on with the task of building up friendship with our immediate neighbors...