Bubblehammerblog

18:53 25/09/2008

It being the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service, BBC 4 screened a biography of Aneurin Bevan. An emotional exeprience for me. Surprised to find that Greg Dyke was an admirer too, he described closing the second volume of Michael Foot's biography of Nye Bevan in a flood of tears. Bevan was a giant, a proper working class hero, & his life inspires an emotional response like this.Seems we weep for the heroes of socialism like the shi'a weep on hearing the story of Imam Hussain.

The birth of the NHS was something of a miracle.Without a bruiser like Bevan making it happen with his fists it would never have come into being. Lots of doctors didn't want it, fearing, among other things,being overwhelmed by a stampede of poor people demanding treatment - which is exactly what happened.There were even reports of people getting prescriptions for gauze bandage to put up as net curtains. Bevan had to bribe the doctors, as he put it, with gold.

At the time the country wasn't generally enthusiastic about much at all. There was food & fuel rationing, & everyone had shivered through the coldest winter on record in 1947. The dismal details of the miserable postwar years can be found in David Kynaston's excellent Austerity Britain,1945-51. Though an avowedly socialist government had been elected, there was no mass movement of trades unionist & socialist activists - every gain was a struggle against the class interests of the former rulers & the inertia of the dog tired & often disinterested workers. Shagged out, war-ravaged economies are not ideal incubators of socialist revolution, as Marx had farsightedly pointed out. In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolsheviks had no more than 8,000 members.

During the BBC Nye Bevan documentary the Tory brahmin Michael Brilliantine was interviewed about the current relevance of the socialism that inspired Bevan. He leaned back in his chair & smiled. Yes it was smug, self satisfied. He said that, as Tony Blair had made clear, it was all utterly irrelevant now. So what my grandfather fought for after the First World War, what my father learned from the Second World War & down the pits, & what both of them passed on to me, is irrelavant. A waste of time as it turned out. As they say, how does that make you feel?

This had me thinking about my relationship to the past. My beautiful youngest daughter has never heard of Nye Bevan, despite her expensive university education. I wonder what she can possibly make of my pride at being the son of coal miners & steel workers. How could she make any sense of that? Will my gransons even know about it? We are people without a past, nothing connects us to where we came from.
Even our defeat is irrelevant.

It's also 40 years since 1968. What a year that was, I was 18 years old. The title 'Summer of Love', invented years later, wouldn't have meant much to me, being a self-styled freak rather than a hippie. Hippies were mostly a student & media phenomena.

I went to the the '68 Grosvenor Square demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I'd hitch-hiked down to London with the celebrated poet Robert E. Gilpin. It'd taken us nearly three days to get down the M1 motorway, since Bob, (or 'Dog's Knob'as his mates & admirers called him),had shoulder length hair, & motorists either hurled sexual abuse at us, or amused themselves by pulling in to stop, then screeching off as we panted towards them with our heavy kitbags.

The demo had already turned nasty when we arrived, & the scuffers were running at people with truncheons. At one point we came across three coppers dishing out a shoeing to a comrade, who was curled up on the pavement in a foetal position clutching his copies of Black Dwarf. I ran over & picked up a Wall's Ice Cream sign from outside a shop & floored one of the coppers with it. Dog's Knob managed to pull off another's helmet, & deployed it on the prostrate copper's head, swinging it by the chinstrap, much like a handbag. The bloodied comrade managed to get to his feet & leg it, then the enraged police came after us. One of them threw this trunchoen at my head, just missing. We legged it too.

They chased us for what seemed like miles. Belting down Kensington High St. with the coppers 20 yards behind us, Dog's Knob crashed into a young couple who were stepping out of what was then called a 'boutique', a shop that sold poncey clothes. She had on a startling white fur coat & white thigh boots,he an orange silk shirt & candy striped flares, & the bags of clothes they'd bought were scattered all over the pavement. Dog's knob thought this was funny, & let out an insane cackle that impeded his running. We dived down a side street then up a passageway, pinning ourselves against a wall, panting & sniggering.

When we heard the the police pass the end of the passageway we held our breath. The feller with the orange shirt was with them, we could hear him saying, 'They must've come this way, officer, you should cordon off the street.' After about 10 minutes we made a bold break for it, & to our amazement, got clean away. It took me ages to talk Dog's Knob out of the notion of setting off to find the twat in the orange shirt & caving his head in with a housebrick. When I spotted him on television years later I recognised him immediately, it was David Bowie.

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