Ready for Power

After his rambunctious foreign-policy speech, Nye Bevan was meek as a lamb when Labor's conference got under way. Reason: party unity.

The first suspicion that Nye was not going to do his usual roaring came as the delegates considered Leader Hugh Gaitskell's favorite proposal to switch from "oldfashioned nationalization" to a scheme for state buying of shares in key industries (TIME, July 29). Bevan, a longtime and passionate advocate of nationalization, sat impassively on the platform as old-line Socialists jeered Gaitskell from the floor. "Sheer capitalism," yelled a delegate. "I'd better take off me boots and put on me spats," said a quarry worker from the midlands. Asked old (72) Manny Shin well, grizzled orator from the smoky Clydeside: "Have I been fighting 54 years for Socialism for nothing?" Even Bevan's wife, tiny Jennie Lee, waved a copy of the new party plan at her husband and shrilled: "Take it back. Give us a program for the next five years of Labor government." But Nye sat silently on, and Hugh Gaitskell had the votes. Hard-fisted Frank Cousins, boss of the huge Transport and General Workers Union, swung the trade union's massive support to him in return for a pledge that road transport and steel, restored to private ownership by the Tories in 1953, would be renationalized when the Laborites return to power.

Howls & Sparks. Two days later, Bevan once again reversed himself--and gave further thought to the high position he hopes to hold. Time was when Bevan said it would be "madness" and a "crime" for Britain to explode the H-bomb. Now he opposed a resolution to outlaw H-bomb tests.

Nye slumped in red-faced solemnity on the platform as delegates hurled all his old arguments back at him. A Lanarkshire mother pleaded that Nye save her two sons from the leukemia that fallout would bring. Frank Cousins himself rose to confess unashamedly that he saw this issue in terms of his six-year-old daughter and favored abolishing the bomb. When Bevan finally took the floor to answer, the hall stirred. "I have probably made more speeches to more people condemning the bomb than anyone else at this conference," he began. "I am as strongly against it as ever. But what this conference must not do is to decide on demolishing the whole fabric of British international relations without putting anything in its place ... To pass this motion would mean that you will send the British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference chamber."

Tears & Dirndls. Howls of protest rose in the hall. Red and angry he stood his ground, his eyes darting blue sparks. When the hubbub quieted, he spoke slowly. "If war were to break out between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.," he said with heavy emphasis, "this country would be poisoned together with the rest of mankind. I want an opportunity of influencing the policies of these countries. If a Socialist Foreign Secretary is to have a chance, he must not be disarmed diplomatically and intellectually." Bevan seemed utterly frank. He said he had heard rumors that he was taking this line only because he wanted to be Foreign Secretary. "Hear, hear," a voice cried. Said Nye plaintively: "That is a pretty bitter thing to say about me. I would never do anything I did not believe in."

Bevan sat down in a tumult. As the conference recessed, militant Old Socialists stood with tears in their eyes. The angry young men and women of the Bevanite movement huddled in their signatory tweeds, dirndls and sandals as if lost without their leader. Hastily Cousins persuaded his T.W.U. group, by a 16-to-14 vote, to reverse their stand and follow Bevan, Then the conference voted by ah overwhelming majority to drop its anti-bomb resolution.

With Nye discreetly lined up with the moderate leadership, the Labor Party felt in election trim.

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