Aneurin Bevan

Who was Aneurin Bevan?

Aneurin "Nye" Bevan was a Welsh Labour Party politician who was the Minister for Health in the post-war Attlee government from 1945 to 1951. The son of a coal miner, Bevan was a lifelong champion of social justice and the rights of working people. He was a long-time Member of Parliament, representing Ebbw Vale in southern Wales for 31 years. He was one of the chief spokesmen for the Labour party’s left wing, and of left-wing British thought generally. His most famous accomplishment came when, as Minister of Health in the post-war Attlee government, he spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, which was to provide medical care free at point-of-need to all Britons. He resigned when the Attlee government proposed to charge patients a fee for eyeglasses and dentures.

Famous Quotes:

• I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
• Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.
• You're not an M.P., you're a gastronomic pimp.
• It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
• Poor fellow, he suffers from files.
• Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
• I am not going to spend any time whatsoever in attacking the Foreign Secretary. If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey when the organ grinder is present.
• Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
• We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
• Reactionary: A man walking backwards with his face to the future.