ABSTRACT
Domestic issues provoked little controversy within the Labour party until the issue of steel nationalisation from 1947 onwards. Foreign affairs, however, produced more dissension in the earlier rather than the later years. Soon after the 1945 election, left-wing critics berated the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, for backing royalists in Greece and for lending British aid to Franco-Dutch attempts to regain control of their Far Eastern colonies from local nationalists. Then Anglo-Soviet friction and Britain’s alignment with the USA against the USSR in the Cold War added fuel to the flames. Was this a ‘socialist foreign policy’? Was this ‘Left understanding Left’? One wit decided that the Foreign Secretary was really Eden grown fat. Bevin became widely regarded, in Churchill’s phrase, as ‘a working-class John Bull’, much to the dismay of critics on the left. But leftwing criticisms then died down. Public opinion began to endorse the critical view of the Soviet Union presented in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Soviet aggression in Prague and then the Soviet blockade of Berlin, both in 1948, convinced the party that its government’s policy was broadly correct. Many historical accounts, and in particular Alan Bullock’s masterly biography of Bevin, have endorsed this favourable view. Bullock is convinced that Bevin was one of Britain’s best foreign secretaries: Marshall Aid and, more significantly, NATO were the monuments to his constructive genius. But some in the party, while disillusioned with Stalin, nevertheless wished Britain to lead a third force, a genuinely socialist alternative to the capitalist USA and the communist Soviet Union. Perhaps Bevin was being led astray by the Old Etonians at the Foreign Office? According to one Labour backbencher he was ‘a Titan grown weary’, of whom the Foreign Office took advantage to continue unchecked ‘its normal routine of unplanned catastrophe’, an interpretation recently endorsed by John Saville. To critical left-wing historians, Bullock’s biography is little more than a very erudite and scholarly form of hero worship.
