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*especially, not even

though I suppose we might have different interpretations of common sense

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EDIT: I see this vital intervention of mine has pushed us onto a new page. Update towards the end of page 61 for all who’ve yet to read.
 
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*especially, not even

though I suppose we might have different interpretations of common sense

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Taking the side of the company just after a massive catastrophe that's caused a nation wide (or Wales wide anyway) strike and then driving into the middle of the picket line with government agents backing them up, asking for 'their' coal back?

The only way they could have handled it worse would be by sending troops with guns. At least someone in the government looked up 'prior political catastrophes' and nixed that idea...
 
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The only way they could have handled it worse would be by sending troops with guns. At least someone in the government looked up 'prior political catastrophes' and nixed that idea...
The prior political catastrophe in question here of course being the literal catalyst for the breakdown of the United Kingdom. Talk about collective memory…

But then these are people of the Douglas Jay school we’re dealing with, who genuinely still have faith in the wisdom of the planners and like to do politics by ‘grown up conversations’. If Bevan really wanted to throw his weight around he probably could, even if it would split the government. But the sunny uplands of the post-Mosley consensus are still a strong enough memory that he’s not going to do this. Yet.
 
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I have just read the inaugural post "A Contingent State: Political Agency in the Making of the Commonwealth". It is really fascinating to read, DensleyBlair, and judging by the Table of Contents, I have a lot of interesting posts to binge read. :D

EDIT: I finally caught up to this point in my binge-reading. 11 pages left to go through this amazing AAR.
 
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I have just read the inaugural post "A Contingent State: Political Agency in the Making of the Commonwealth". It is really fascinating to read, DensleyBlair, and judging by the Table of Contents, I have a lot of interesting posts to binge read. :D
Thank you for checking this out, Nathan, and welcome to the thread! It's good to have you with us. I hope you enjoy the binge, and please do feel free to stop by with thoughts on things as you read. However old the chapter may be, I'm always keen to hear what people think of them.

You may have seen from the Contents that wrapped up within this project is a history of the USA during the Cold War written by my good co-author @99KingHigh . I'll be particularly eager to hear your reaction to this when you get to it! :D
 
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To go back a little, given the disruption in Guyana I wonder what Walter Rodney is up to now. Might be a target for some under the table dosh from the Commonwealth, or the Soviets.
 
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To go back a little, given the disruption in Guyana I wonder what Wlater Rodney is up to now. Might be a target for some under the table dosh from the Commonwealth, or the Soviets.
Good call. I plan to touch back in on the Guyanese situation in a couple of chapters’ time, particularly with Jagan coming to Britain in the New Year. Rodney will definitely be doing something, whether that might be coming over to Britain for a bit or maybe striking out into Trinidad or Jamaica. Or even getting involved in the farrago that is the Cuban left…
 
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128 Days: The Decline and Fall of Bevanite Britain (IV)
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128 DAYS
The Decline and Fall of Bevanite Britain

Gwyn Alf Williams, 1980


(IV)


On January 5, British Coal director Fred Collinson was summoned to the Assembly to answer questions on the conduct of its workers at Cwm Darran and Deep Duffryn. The encounter between the technocrat and the representatives was a terse one. Collinson was by no means another Albert Roberts, taken with the lavish lifestyle afforded by his position, but what he lacked in flashy presentation he made up for in his unshakeable belief in the validity of his organisation’s argument. All coal mined in the Commonwealth was the property of the state, managed by British Coal on behalf of the government and, by extension, the people. If one were inclined to sympathy towards the miners at the Free Pits, one might therefore take the opinion that there was no foul in bypassing the middlemen and brining the coal straight to the people – but not Collinson. He held that the system would not work except as planned, which meant that the coal industry had to be managed from above, by ‘professionals’, and not by those working, literally, at the coalface. He did not expect things to run smoothly all of the time, and he would happily concede that strike action and worker–manager bargaining were part and parcel of any modern industry, but for him a worker seizing the fruits of their labour was a step too far. To this end, he maintained that British Coal had a right to take back its property, and while he was remorseful for the fact that the collection attempts had led to the death of Gwion Parry, he refused to entertain the idea that the attempts were wrong on principle.

With the legitimacy of British Coal having already crashed through the floor among in the Valleys, Collinson’s willingness to defend the policy of collections did nothing to repair the relationship. Albert Roberts’ pantomime villainy had been replaced by the manner of backroom technicians, inoffensive in peacetime but susceptible to gross callousness in a crisis. Beyond any exceptional lack of compassion in any one figure, the public scrutiny of British Coal’s conduct exposed a much more pernicious disconnect between regulation and reality. Systems and structures put in place twenty, thirty or even forty years prior were being upheld and defended without question in the face of undeniable evidence that they had become irrelevant at best – and harmful at worst. At Gwion Parry’s funeral on January 10, attended by five thousand miners from across South Wales and beyond, Deep Duffryn shop steward Huw Price delivered a eulogy in which he attacked not just the people but the systems that had brought about Parry’s death. “It may have been one man who took Gwion from us,” he began,


but behind that man were a thousand other men: men who had become so comfortable in their world of quotas and statistics that they forgot what it meant to be a worker at all. These men forget that coal isn’t measured in pounds or pence, but in sweat and blood. It has taken two tragedies already to bring this simple fact to light. How many more must we endure before those men in Whitehall start taking it to heart?


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Funeral of Gwion Parry, January 10 1967.


All around the country, these anti-establishment sentiments began to take hold. The day after Gwion Parry’s funeral, the NFMU released a statement repeating their demand for urgent and radical reform to the coal industry, accusing the government of using the Aberfan disaster inquiry as a means fo ‘buying time’ and delaying action. The following Saturday (January 14), NFMU delegating from across the Commonwealth convened at an extraordinary conference in Derby to discuss a co-ordinated response to the ongoing coal industry crisis. Aside from resolving to maintain a total boycott of government efforts to lessen the impact of the strike in South Wales, the union voted to begin working to rule from January 30 unless the government committed to an immediate review of the operation of British Coal, taking into account the grievances of the miners in South Wales. Over the following week, TUC leader Jack Jones met with the leaders of the NFMU and the TGWU to agree to a ‘ceasefire’ between miners and lorry drivers. The TGWU released a statement reaffirming its condemnation of the killing of Gwion Parry, and on January 23 began began balloting its members on whether to take action in solidarity with the miners in their attempt to disrupt the coal redistribution programme.


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Miners from Maerdy, at the head of the Rhondda Valley, arrive at the extraordinary conference of the NFMU, January 14 1967.


In Westminster, the looming breakdown in relations between the government and the unions aggravated existing tensions in cabinet. By the end of January, Bevan’s ministers had come around to the idea that British Coal could not continue to operate in its current form. The question of what changes to implement would be key in diffusing tensions in the coal industry. Bevan’s preferred route out of the crisis was to accede to some of the demands of the Welsh miners, announcing plans to explore the creation of a devolved coal management board for the Welsh pits. LUPA allies agreed with the plan for devolution, but David Lewis, who throughout the crisis had advocated a strong response to union militancy, believed that this would be too much, too soon. Lewis wanted to use the crisis to initiate ‘proactive’ reforms to the coal industry, decentralising decision-making powers within British Coal by ushering in a new, decentralised management structure. In effort, this amounted to a programme of ‘managerialism revisited’, promising a more flexible and more efficient hierarchy while keeping executive power in the hands of a professional class. Politically, it was a risky proposition; even if it was not exactly fresh in the memory, the first great battle over ‘managerialisation’ twenty years before had not been entirely forgotten. The idea of worker self-management was more popular in the aftermath of Aberfan than it had been at any point in a generation, and Lewis’s faith in state planning – albeit in a decentralised form – was out of step with public opinion from the start.

Privately, Lewis balked at the idea of turning over state industries to the workers themselves. This scepticism emerged from a set of somewhat contradictory beliefs. As previously discussed, Lewis was no state-championing dogmatist; in many ways, he was on a one-man crusade to rehabilitate the word ‘enterprise’ in the British popular imagination. At the same time, neither did he believe in liberalisation for its own sake, holding that the onus was on private forces to prove that they could manage an industry more efficiently and more equitably than the state. In sum, for want of a better word, Lewis was an elitist: he believed that no large industry could be run effectively ‘from the ground up’, and that only state oversight was suitably placed to correct inefficiencies and inequalities alike. This same elitism coloured Lewis’s perception of the unions, which he viewed with suspicion when not ‘doing their bit’ to assist in the cosy workings of his preferred market-socialist system. He was unimpressed by the ease with which Bevan and his allies had ‘conceded’ to the union view of things: that the Merthyr Vale Free Pit had a right to exist, and that this should be taken as a starting point for reforms to British Coal.



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David Lewis.


Predictably, the suspicion ran both ways. In union circles, the dispute between Bevan and Lewis over coal industry reform seemed insignificant. On January 25, five days before the NFMU deadline, Peggy Herbison appeared in the Assembly to deliver the government’s initial proposals on reforming British Coal. These amounted more or less to a compromise between the two poles of argument in the cabinet: the Welsh pits would be run by a devolved body based in Cardiff, to be named ‘Welsh Coal’ (or, in a nod to the autonomists, ‘Glo Cymru’). The new body, however, would still be run along centralist lines, with control over the pits and coal production more broadly to revert to state managers. To give more weight to the devolutionist moment, following Herbison’s appearance Dick Crossman announced, deputising for an absent Bevan, the planned creation of new government departments to deal specifically with Welsh and Scottish affairs. These departments would come into existence after the election, should the government hold its majority.

This package of reform fell flat with the NFMU leadership. Although the union welcomed the government’s clear commitment to working towards a solution, it released a statement expressing regret that the proposals said nothing about worker self-management, which had now assumed significance as a point of contention within the wider dispute. These sentiments were reflected industry-wide; to those at the coalface, a bureaucrat in Cardiff felt just as distant as a bureaucrat in Whitehall, and there was a sense among miners in South Wales that their anti-establishmentarianism had been met only with the creation of a new establishment. SWMF leader Dai Francis dismissed the government plans as endowing a class of ‘managers with Welsh accents’, urging the national union leadership not to back down in the fight for ‘what in South Wales we have already proved possible’: self-determination.



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Barbara Lewis.


The government’s first attempt at a compromise rejected, it was clear that one side in the inter-cabinet debate was going to have to back down if a more robust settlement were to be achieved. The Bevanite opinion was by now turning towards worker control, opening up to Jack Jones’s programme of ‘shop-stewardism’ as a means of ‘letting air in’ to the fading coal industry. In cabinet, this position was argued by Dick Crossman, Peggy Herbison, Jennie Lee and Michael Foot, who as Assembly chair would be key to any effort to see reform passed before the looming election. Polling day was set for May 4, which meant that the Assembly would be dissolved on April 6. This gave the government just over two months in which to oversee perhaps the most complex industrial reform proposed in at least a generation, thus the fact that Foot was in place with the potential to speed legislation through the Assembly was a large bonus for the Bevanites. Speed, of course, was no promise of success – but facing the prospect of a protracted industrial dispute coming up to the harshest part of the winter, it was a welcome advantage.

By contrast, the Lewisite opinion was far riskier, targeting the unions rather than the industrial base. Believing that the compromise as delivered on January 25 was sound, David Lewis and his wife Barbara at the employment bureau resolved to push it through by force. This would mean binding the unions to a formal ‘social contract’ that would see a return to the more hospitable days of the mid decade, placing restrictions on strike action and seeking to supplant the threat of confrontation with mediation and arbitration processes. The risks were self-evident. The Bevanite option of worker control would put the Commonwealth economy on uncharted waters, but the Lewisite proposal would put on the government on course for a direct confrontation with the unions. In the winter of 1967, this was not a fight in which the government would be guaranteed to come out on top.


The End of the Thaw

At the meeting of cabinet on the morning of January 26, Bevan arrived in an uncompromising mood. Abandoning his usual, consensual style of chairmanship, he announced to his colleagues that he had taken a executive decision on how the government was to move forward in the crisis. Peggy Herbison would return to the Assembly the next day – the last business day before the NFMU’s January 30 deadline – and outline plans to implement steps towards worker control of the coal industry, in line with measures already taken in smaller industries. Pre-empting opposition from Lewis and his allies, Bevan insisted that this would be done on the condition that no final vote would be taken before the election. In effect, this set up the election as a contest to be fought on the issue of industrial reform – as much a question of time as of political expediency. Bevan believed that the unions would be reasonable about this condition and agree to postpone any strike action, or action short of a strike, at least until the election had concluded. By this point, Britain would be into the heating season and any threat of a winter fuel shortage would be well past. The prospect of seeing real reform enacted in a few months time, Bevan wagered, would appeal more to the NFMU and its members than a bitter winter walkout.



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Peggy Herbison (right) with Education Secretary Jennie Lee.


No sooner had the cabinet erupted into fierce discussion of Bevan’s dictate than they were silenced by his second revelation. Appealing for calm, Bevan informed his colleagues that he intended to step down as premier at the election, and that the job of steering through reform would have to fall to his successor. The reason for this was simple, and in effect the decision was not Bevan’s to make. Since the previous summer, Bevan disclosed, he had been receiving treatment for stomach cancer. Close cabinet allies had known since his initial diagnosis, but discretion had left the chairman from sharing the news generally. In the past week, however, Bevan’s doctors had advised him that his condition had taken an unexpected turn for the worse, and that it was now like that he had only months left to live. So long as he remained able, he would continue to lead the government over the coming months, with deputy chairman David Lewis taking over the running of cabinet as required. This would give the government three months to plan for a handover, as well as giving the governing coalition members time to decide how it intended to go into the election in Bevan’s absence.


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Aneurin Bevan.


As planned, Herbison apprised the Assembly of the government’s plans to explore worker control of the coal industry. This was a major victory for the opposition, and as expected the move was welcomed by the unions. Jack Jones phoned Bevan personally that afternoon to express his pleasure at the announcement, and a warm statement followed from the NFMU that evening. In Merthyr Vale, the miners declared victory and celebrated the ‘death’ of British Coal with raucous processions through the streets of Aberfan over the weekend. The Saturday papers led with stories of industrial reform, the left-wing tabloid The Mirror running a picture of the Free Pit on its front page under the headline: ‘POWER TO THE WORKERS!’. By contrast, the Popular Front–supporting Tribune characterised the story in a much more sober fashion: ‘GOVERNMENT TO PRESS AHEAD WITH COAL REFORM’. This absence of enthusiasm was a herald of things to come, the economic consensus of the previous thirty years – arguably dead already by 1967 – having been finally dispatched in one morning’s work. No longer unified by deference to one system, the starting gun had been fired on the long-awaited race to dictate the terms of reform. The left had taken an early lead, but the path to success was not without obstacles – not least the coming election. Even in government divisions were showing, and it remained to be seen whether the settlement Bevan had imposed would survive the next few months.


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A poster produced in support of the Free Pits, 1967.
The cause of the Welsh miners and their communities garnered great sympathy throughout much of the rest of the Commonwealth, contributing to an explosion in the popularity of the idea of worker self-direction.


With the coming of February came a turn in the weather. January had been unseasonably mild, alleviating the worst effects of the coal crisis by keeping Britain’s heating demand to a minimum. The next month brought a cold snap, adding a fresh urgency to the work of those in Westminster and elsewhere now tasked with formulating a viable programme to turn over the collieries to worker control. This urgency was also brought into sharp focus for a different reason. On February 1, Chairman Bevan addressed the Assembly to make a formal announcement about his plans to retire at the end to the current legislative session. For those who were unaware of his worsening health, which was everyone outside of the cabinet and the LUPA, the news came as a total shock. Bevan declined to go into details about his reasoning, making reference only to his forty-year career in national politics and expressing a wish to enjoy a period of retirement. None saw fit to question him, and coming on the back of a career-best display of crisis resolution none would begrudge a man who had given his working life to the Commonwealth some peace in his old age.

Now in his sixty-ninth year, Bevan was a far cry from the young revolutionary who had shot to public prominence as the firebrand leader of the South Welsh miners in 1927. Then, he had been an unstoppable force of youth: as powerful a presence physically as politically, injecting an urgency into revolutionary politics that was perhaps matched only by Mosley himself and the late Arthur Cook. If after nearly six years in the premiership he looked a shell of his former self, this was only to bet expected: Aneurin Bevan had been handed a poisoned chalice, taking on the leadership of the British state after three decades of Mosleyite excess. The country whose government he led had been scarred by political repression and driven half into the ground by overcooked economic thinking. The spirit of the revolution, such as it survived, was barely remembered and spoken of only in hushed tones. From Windscale to Red Flash, Britain had been too quick to plough vast amounts of resources into vanity projects and unsustainable industries, with nothing to show for its efforts but a critically unbalanced economy and an overbearing list of international commitments. With great effort, Bevan and his allies led a movement to refresh this tired political system, reinstating old freedoms won at the barricades and coaxing the Commonwealth onto a more sustainable path. This journey was by no means smooth, and just as often as it met success the Bevanite project was forced to confront failure. After a few years, the reformist dream seemed to run out of steam, and both at home and abroad Bevan progressed as if adrift on a tide that moved too quickly for him to keep up. In key areas he acted too late (arguments could be made about the slow pace of press reform), and in some cases he was misguided (foreign affairs; industrial policy prior to 1967). At times, particularly as a leader at the climax of the Cold War, he even appeared hopelessly naïve – although surely it is he, and not Kennedy or Khrushchev, whom history will absolve. Yet through all of this, one is forced to conclude that he acted at all times out of a desire to best uphold those original principles that had compelled him to take up the fight against the old state in 1927: freedom, peace and the welfare of all workers and all people. It was nothing remarkable, having been through all of this, if now he looked tired or worse for wear.



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Chairman Bevan (centre) and President Ian Mikardo (right).


With tears in his eyes, Bevan listened as members from all parties in the Assembly rose to follow his statement with tributes to his many years of service. David Lewis spoke warmly of his friendship with his coalition partner of six years, crediting him with the strongest will he had ever encountered in politics and ending with a reflection on his role in ousting the Mosley regime. Leaders of the left opposition contributed to the occasion with tributes to his record during the revolution. Lawrence Daly, who was four years old at the inception of the Commonwealth, maintained that, in spite of their political disagreements, Bevan had been a ‘lifelong hero’ and praised the example he set in his dedication to the Commonwealth project. Anne Bersey, the same age as Daly, lauded Bevan for his commitment to peace abroad ‘even when it was not fashionable’, while Ernest Millington described him simply as a ‘giant’ of the labour movement and wished him well in his retirement.

Outside of parliament, the general mood sat somewhere between shock, sadness and uncertainty. Shock, because few had foreseen Bevan’s announcement even in his late Sixties; sadness, because even among political opponents Bevan remained a sympathetic figure; and uncertainty, because suddenly what had seemed the day before like the beginning of a new period of optimism for Britain had now been thrown into question. At the very least, change would remain a constant factor, but all at once it was no longer certain what this change might look like. There was nothing to say that Bevan’s successor, whoever they were, would see fit to continue with his programme of reform to resolve the recent crisis. As The Morning Post remarked, regardless of the outcome, with Bevan’s retirement the upcoming election was now guaranteed to produce the first uncontested transfer of power from one elected premier to another in Britain since the pre-revolutionary era. While this heralded the welcome return of a certain flavour of democratic process, it brought with it the possibility that the very delicate balancing act now holding together the various competing branches of the British state – government, industry and worker – might once again be disturbed. February 1967 thus passed along in Britain as if in an in-between state, the Commonwealth caught in an extended moment between the passing of one order and the coming of the next, simply waiting for the dissolution of the Assembly to restart political life in two months’ time.

Things may well have continued this way all the way up to election day, but any hopes that some sense of equilibrium had returned to British politics were to prove premature. On the evening of March 9, Tony Benn took to the airwaves of CBC Radio 1 . . .
 
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6 O'Clock News with Tony Benn, Mar 9 1967
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CBC News at 6 o’clock. This is Tony Benn. Good evening.

Aneurin Bevan, Chairman of the Executive Committee, has died this afternoon at his home in North London at the age of 69. His death comes after a ten-month battle with stomach cancer. Chairman Bevan is survived by his wife, the Education Secretary Jennie Lee.

Throughout the day, tributes have been paid to the late Chairman by political leaders both past and present. President Ian Mikardo praised Mr Bevan as a ‘titan of the labour movement’. Former Chairman John Strachey, whom Bevan succeeded as premier in 1961, described him as a ‘formidable figure’ in the history of the Commonwealth.

Messages of condolence have also come in from abroad. European Syndicate Chairman Maurice Faure hailed Chairman Bevan as a ‘lynchpin of the syndicalist fraternity’. Soviet Premier Kosygin, in a statement released via the news agency Tass, commended Mr Bevan’s ‘lifelong commitment to the causes of peace and socialism’. From Washington, President Kennedy conveyed his sympathies to Mrs Lee . . .



*


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Aneurin Bevan
November 15 1897 – March 9 1967
Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth, 1961–67
 
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"Now let me tell you something, John. As far as I can make out, this guy was the mushiest, softest bastard ever born on either side of the pond...I mean a real lilly if you get my meaning. You ask me, it was the damn miners that killed him."​
 
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The Death of Nye Bevan: Boothby
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1 Eaton Square – March 1967

"Tell me, Ronnie, what's the word on the street? Who are your boys tipping for the top job?"

"I might as well ask you the same question, Robert. You'd know far more about that than me."

"Oh, come on. You're telling me you haven't heard a thing?"

"Well, not nothing… I have heard rumours of a few discerning gentlemen having a punt on Dick Crossman."

"Double Crossman? Yes, I suppose I should've seen that one coming. Not Jennie, then?"

"What, Mrs Bevan? Nah. Don't think she's seen as having the appetite for it, if you catch my meaning. Although I wouldn't be against it myself."

"I see… And what about Lewis? Anything?"

"The Canadian cunt? I thought your lot all hated him?"

"They do. But I wouldn't hold that against him. And don't forget, he'll be in charge till the election. He's not going to let those two months slip by without putting them to good use, that's for sure."

"Granted, Robert, granted. But even then, he's got the election to worry about. You don't see that going his way, do you?"

"I wouldn't have done this time last week, but now that Nye's gone? … Let me put it this way, Ronnie: I'm game for a flutter as any man, but even I know foolishness when I see it. I wouldn't still be here if I didn't."

"No, I guess not Robert. Speaking of, don't you fancy throwing your hat in the ring? You've got a few years left in you yet…"

"I couldn't think of anything I would like to do less, Ronnie. No, I'll be leaving this one to the others, that's for bloody sure. Besides, I've got other plans."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes indeed, Ronald. I'm getting married."

"Well in that case, Robert, let me be the first to congratulate you! More champagne?"

"Keep it coming, Ronnie. Keep it coming."



*


 
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And so passes Bevan - the lack of an immediate 'plan' makes me worry about the succession.
Things happened a bit quicker than anticipated at the end, that’s for sure. (@99KingHigh’s Nixon probably has it right in a way – it’s the miners wot did it…) But the government isn’t completely rudderless; Lewis as Bevan’s deputy is on hand to take over until the election.

The question, of course, is whether everyone is happy to play nice now that Nye is gone…

Priceless - let's hope it is slightly less, well, grim.
I couldn’t resist!

As for grimness – thankfully we don’t have a Beria to worry about, but it won’t be entirely… civilised
 
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The Death of Nye Bevan: Crossman
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Banbury, Oxfordshire – March 1967


“Mr Crossman! Would you care to comment on the rumours that you are considering a bid for the chairmanship?”

“Gentlemen, please. Nye Bevan hasn’t even been dead a week, this is not the time for party politics.”

“Does David Lewis have your support as interim chairman?”

“Chairman Bevan had full confidence in Chairman Lewis as his deputy, and I in turn have full confidence that we are safe in Chairman Lewis’s hands until the election.”

“Will the coalition survive the election, Mr Crossman? Is the rift over worker control beyond repair?”

“If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, my wife and I would like to get home. Good day.”
 
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Loving all of these little vignettes, really bring it up to the feeling of how the news would present these little interactions.
 
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Loving all of these little vignettes, really bring it up to the feeling of how the news would present these little interactions.
Thanks Wraith! Glad you’re enjoying them. Thought I may as well have a bit of fun with the whole ‘death of Bevan’ thing seeing as we have a few contenders circling… I’ll keep them coming through the week until we get to the actual meat of what’s going on.
 
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You do mean you!
 
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