The Mirage of Socialism?

To my enormous surprise and delight--never expecting to find such a book in so notoriously a Republican town as Ft. Wayne--I found at a sale at the Allen County Public Library's main branch downtown a copy of John Campbell's Aneurin Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (Norton, 1987). The timing was impeccable: just as I finished John Bew's new biography of Clement Attlee--discussed here--I found this book of Campbell's almost the next day. I have been reading it off and on over the past few months along with any of the other dozen and more books I typically have on the go at a given time. Fittingly if unintentionally I finished it on the Welsh patronal feast of St. David last Friday.

It is a curious book, largely a biography but also a work of political analysis. It does both well enough to have been enjoyable, though it leaves things to be desired. E.g., it leaves parts of Bevan's biography insufficiently explored--the last year leading up to his very early death gets about two paragraphs, and his wife is never more than a stilted cartoon figure who walks on and off the edges of his life but rarely. Still, we have, as the author recognized, other fuller biographies even at the time this was published more than 30 years ago, including especially that written in 1963 by fellow Labour politician Michael Foot, a book Campbell says is excessively hagiographic.

The title half led me to expect some kind of right-wing attack on Bevan's politics, but it does not do that. Rather, it takes a very sympathetic approach to Bevan's life but argues--and not without a good deal of evidence--that by 1950 Bevan was about the only socialist left in the Labour government, which continued both to run out of steam and in so doing to list rightward. Bevan himself began to lose interest in a wavering government, which was constantly trimming its sails in response to American pressure, financial issues (especially the American demands for absurd increases in defense spending to respond to the Korean war), and the changing politics of Britain, where there seems to have been a direct relationship between the increase in postwar prosperity and the decrease in support for socialism. Bevan constantly wanted to fight things out from first principles, but as time went on he seems to have been an increasingly lone voice in adopting this approach.

Attlee, of course, appointed Bevan in 1945 to head up both housing and health, either portfolio being massive given the huge demands for new housing to be built as quickly as possible. Bevan gave less attention to the latter, building fewer (but larger, and of higher quality) houses than his Tory successor would after 1952. But Bevan's signature achievement, for which he continues to be celebrated regularly as the greatest Welshman of the last century and more, is the National Health Service, which he brought into being in 1948, and defended even against his own party (especially Herbert Morrison and Hugh Gaitskell) ever after.

In addition to that, he was regularly counted the only equal to Churchill in being able to give stem-winder speeches to rally his side or to attack the government. Churchill apparently came to loathe him but respected his ability in this area, as did others, including Attlee, who would reluctantly but reliably trot Bevan out to bring a debate to a rousing conclusion.

If there are lessons here for current American debates about a supposed "return to socialism" they are to be found in Campbell's key word: mirage. The current attacks from the right on "socialism" are all about optics and making certain ideas appear to be terrible without having to define, much less debate, them. But equally, as he shows, fewer and fewer people in the Labour party after 1945 themselves had a coherent understanding of socialism, let alone attempted a full implementation of it--apart, that is, from Bevan, whose own character flaws, and then premature death, combined with a rightward moving political environment, made the achievements of 1945-48 about as far in the direction of "socialism" as any government has ever gone. We can therefore confidently assert that whenever "socialism" and its cognates are trotted out today, they are always in the genre of phantasmagoria.