Ernest Bevin, Labour's Churchill (Biography)
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For all his power and presence during his life and immediately afterward, Ernest Bevin is today is little remembered outside of trade union and Labour circles. For all his organisational abilities (for example, forming the Transport and General Workers Union, one of Britain’s most powerful unions which was at one point the largest trade union in the democratic world) his contributions in government obscure that legacy, and thus reduce Bevin as a figure of historical interest. He has been the subject of previous biographies, including a series by Alan Bullock covering both his time as trade union leader and Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government, which I firmly recommend.
However, it has been some years since Bullock published his work, and Bevin’s pugnacious figure has once again become a subject of interest within the Labour Party. His legacy has grown all the more important since the neoliberal turn in the British economy in the 1980s and the subsequent discord that has developed between the working class and its self-proclaimed party political representatives. Bevin was simultaneously a leading figure in the Labour movement from the late 1920s onwards, and one of the Labour party’s most important ministers. It is in this spirit that Lords Adonis, Secretary of State for Transport under Gordon Brown, a Labour peer and former journalist, policy thinker and former fellow of history at Nuffield College undertook this biography.
Adonis is a quintessentially Blairite figure. He has been a board member of the centre-right Policy Network thinktank, is vehemently pro-European, and maintains the profile of an elite figure in political circles. He has previously collected essays on Roy Jenkins, the Labour-turned Lib Dem ex-cabinet minister who shared many of his views,not least his pro-Europeanism. The ideal historian does not let their personal political beliefs permeate through their work; Adonis fails at this.
There are merits to his biography. He does fantastic work detailing Bevin’s early childhood, including determining Bevin’s previously murky parentage. Out of all the ministers who served in the wartime and 1945 government, Bevin had arguably the most working class upbringing, which Adonis paints in vivid colour. From the death of his parents to having to live with his half-sister, working alongside his brothers in Bristol, Bevin’s was a story that played out across the United Kingdom in the latter Victorian and Edwardian eras. Equally deserving is Adonis’ account of the TGWU, or what Bevin called, the ‘T&G’, and its emergence as a controlled, disciplined political outfit compared to the chaotic radicalism of other unions at the time, particularly the Miners Federation. This latter group would later go on to form the NUM, which would again, as the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain did in 1921 and 1926, cause national upset through their strike action without considering the opinion of the rest of the movement. It was the Federation’s failure to consult the other members of the so-called ‘Triple Alliance’ of labour, in consort with the railway men’s and transport worker’s union, which led to them striking alone for the better part of seven months and produced the poverty Aneurin Bevan described viscerally in his diaries in areas like Wales and the Midlands. Adonis’ ability to capture these elements are meritorious, and he deserves full recognition for them, in addition to the amount of primary evidence and recollections marshalled in the book.
But these strengths do not save the book from its gaping failures. It has no chronological consistency at all. It is confusing to read, the first mark of a poorly written work. Adonis gets mixed up in his own adulation and research into Bevin such that he cannot help but jump from moment to moment, leaving these developments unexplained and only returning to them, with no proper reference to their earlier mention, scores of pages later. Adonis’ vision of Bevin is not a faithful rendition of the pragmatic, yet opinionated trade union boss who dominated British politics, as he is insistent on forcing the reader to appreciate his clumsy comparison to Churchill. Rather than acknowledging Bevin’s relationship, unconscious if not personal, with prior trade union leaders in the party, including significant figures like Arthur Henderson, he waves them away as irrelevancies. His Bevin is so warped as to be unrecognisable, reduced to a tool with which Adonis wages war against those he dislikes on the left - Aneurin Bevan, Ian Mikardo and the broader movement - and the right - Herbert Morrison - alike. For all of Bevin’s power, only one trade union leader has, to date, forced a PM and Chancellor out of their party, and that is Henderson; Bevin is an awe-inspiring figure but one who must be understood within his context for any reading to be worthwhile.
The fundamental issue of this biography is not its subject material nor its research. Adonis has dutifully scoured the records and diaries of the Labour movement to fill out his picture of Bevin. The greater issue is that Adonis writes a political biography – he uses the same myth of Bevin he is allegedly meant to be unwrapping as a cudgel to advance his own views. Clumsy as it is, it’s also frustrating. In the book’s last pages, he postulates an interesting theory, that the socialist parties with closer ties to the trade unions – Australia, the Nordics, and to a lesser extent the UK – have faired better in the post-1990s world than those that have always been more separate to them on the continent like the Parti Socialiste in France of the German SPD. Yet he does not expand on this thought and leaves it with the reader. Had Adonis written on this concept, rather than chasing after the myth of Bevin, this book would have been a far more enjoyable, informative and overall worthwhile read.
As it stands, it is a well-researched, but poorly argued and incoherently argued puff piece, that fails to stand on academic grounds or function as popular reading material.