Aneurin Bevan by Michael Foot

Author:Michael Foot [Michael Foot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571280858
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

No flout from Churchill, in the extensive record of their exchanges, infuriated Bevan more than that one. He had staked his political future on the point at issue – the most direct claim in his resignation speech had been the charge that the £4,700 million programme was ‘already dead’ – and all Churchill could offer was a jeer about unworthy motives and accidental wisdom. Certainly it was a staggering announcement, probably the first and the last in all history in which a Defence Minister explained – at a moment of soaring inflation, what’s more – that the Service departments were not able to spend the money made available by a profligate Treasury. And the deduction Churchill himself drew was even more instructive: the lag in arms production, he said, ‘will, of course, be helpful to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his special problems’. In other words, the failure to spend the Service estimates allowed for would assist in providing a handsome surplus in the Budget, and what a world of reflection that reopened about the 1951 convulsions inside the Labour Party.

But one man at least was not impressed by the Churchill revelation. Invited by Tribune to comment upon it, Hugh Gaitskell wrote an elaborate reply, reiterating the qualifications about the programme; recalling Bevan’s own ‘less guarded’ statement of February, ‘we shall carry it out’; challenging again the Bevan claim that the supply departments had known the figures to be unrealizable even at the time of the Budget; arguing that if an easier Budget had been feasible, neither he nor the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party had been at all certain that the Health Service should have priority. Never then or thereafter did there come from that quarter a single admission that the calculations of the Treasury had been erroneous, either too lax or too strict. All had been as infallibly and meticulously correct4 as the Treasury could make it.

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