Seventy years ago today, Labour MPs mounted the
biggest rebellion of the second world war against the wartime coalition
government’s reluctance to implement the Beveridge report. The overwhelming
majority of the parliamentary Labour Party voted against its own leadership –
coalition cabinet members Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Ernie Bevin who
had pleaded with them not to do so.
Herbert Morrison wound up the debate for the
government, in what Tory diarist described as “a balanced, clever, eloquent speech which
revealed his increasing Conservatism.” His biographers, Bernard
Donoghue and George Jones, nevertheless recognised that in his own party he
paid “a political price for his parliamentary triumph”.
Amongst the arguments he
deployed in favour of the Government’s line of welcoming most of the
Beveridge report in principle but avoiding commitments was one eerily familiar
today: “There has been too much of parties in Opposition or semi-detached
Opposition giving reckless undertakings and making, rather wild promises and
then not carrying them out when they are in power.”
James Griffiths, future Minister for National
Insurance, opened the debate on the rebel amendment calling for “early implementation of
the plan.” The Beveridge plan has become … a symbol of the kind of
Britain we are determined to build when the victory is won, a Britain in which
the mass of the people shall be ensured security from preventable want.”
He had
little time for the Government’s prevarication on financial grounds: “We have
called for sacrifices, and that is our responsibility. The response of our
people has been wonderful, beyond praise, and I hope we shall remember that we
owe these people a debt that we must honour and that we shall begin to honour
that debt to-day.”
The rebels included recent Coalition cabinet
member Arthur Greenwood and chief whip Charles Edwards, future Minister of
Health, Nye Bevan and Manny Shinwell. Altogether 97 Labour MPs – almost
everyone outside the government – together with assorted independents,
ILPers, Common Wealth MPs, Communists and the odd Liberal including David
Lloyd-George voted for Griffiths amendment.
We know the outcome. In spite of
the highest level of public sector debt in 1945 since just after the battle of
Waterloo — about four times today’s level as a proportion of GDP — the Labour
Government did implement the Beveridge plan to create an HS and welfare state.
We can learn from it. Promise what’s needed and keep our promise.
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