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Soon after the Labor victory in 1945, "Nye" Bevan stood amid the tall black blocks of Bolton's cotton mills in Lancashire and told the assembled workers: "Homes, health, education and social security—these are your birthright." That was quite a different list from the one John Locke had drawn up 260 years ago when he summarized man's inalienable rights as life, liberty and property. For better or worse, most Britons today are more wedded to Bevan's list than to Locke's. "Why is it," exclaimed a tall, exasperated Conservative M.P. over a substantial lunch last week, "that whenever I go to speak, the people seem to be interested in nothing but their social security and their dentures?"
Nye Bevan, the hard-eyed lad from the Welsh mines, knows why. The drive for state maternalism is not primarily the work of doctrinaires, Marxist or otherwise; it is a distillation of the bitter experience of Bevan and his comrades. Whether the brew is poison or not, it has been a long time cooking.
Hard Way to Shakespeare. When Aneurin (rhymes with a fire in) Bevan was a boy in Tredegar, South Wales, sickness and disaster were never far from the pithead. His father had been one of the founders of the Tredegar Workingmen's Medical Aid Society. Each member contributed three pennies out of every pound earned; in return, the society hired doctors and dentists to treat the miners or their families when they became ill.
Young "Nyrin" became the society's most vocal member. In a drab little shop, whose dusty windows bore the society's name in proud gilt letters, the committee met each week. Around the bare table sat 30 miners, some straight from the pit, the coal dust still runneled into their sweat-sticky faces. Bevan always spoke precisely and to the point. He had suffered from a bad stammer (caused by an uninformed but successful effort to "correct" his left-handedness), but had overcome it by reciting Shakespeare out loud and forcing himself to speak up in public.
Said Bevan to the Tredegar Aid Society: "I believe that orthopedic surgery can be of great benefit to many miners and I would fight all the doctors of the British Medical Association to prove my point." Or he would cry in his Welsh singsong: "If a specialist is away in Bristol, why should we not be able to send our men to him? Why should not a miner have the right to the best treatment?"
When the stiff-necked British Medical Association boycotted the miners' society, Aneurin Bevan got his chance to fight. "It was wicked, the way those fellows stood in the way of our getting health services to the people," he says, "but we won through."