Word: sevan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...several exits and expulsions, he quit the Cabinet in protest against the government's decision to levy a small fee for patients' spectacles and dentures. Partly as a result, Labor was turned out of office in 1951; the electorate bit the hand that had fed it, with Sevan's false teeth...
Michael Foot, a close associate of Sevan's and since Nye's death in 1960 the M.P. from his old constituency of Ebbw Vale, has completed what is obviously a labor of love, with personal insights and inside information rarely available to a political biographer. He depicts, to be sure, a Nye in shining armor. He also makes clear that with Bevan's demise the fire went out of the belly of British socialism...
...Wales. There were no ambiguities in the mine valley of Nye Sevan's youth; life could be sketched as a charcoal cartoon. In Tredegar, it was lived between the pits and the chapel. The visible enemy was the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co., and the audible heroes were the preachers in the chapels and the orators in the miners' lodges. Nye Bevan grew up in a time when Welsh nonconformity was moving from religion to politics, and Nye moved with the times. He easily shed the Methodist-Baptist faith of his home, because it transformed so easily into political...
Bankrupt Passion. There is no denying the strength and passion of Sevan's rages against the Establishment. In the depths of the Depression of the early -'30s, he saw millions voted to bolster tottering banks and pennies cheese-pared from the dole of the unemployed poor. "Christ drove the moneychangers out of the temple," he snarled at the Tories, "but you inscribe their title deeds on the altar cloth." The trouble was that his fellow Laborites were not really Socialists. When capitalism, in Depression-time phrase, "went bankrupt," Ramsey Macdonald's Socialist government got cold feet...
...power Bevan ever attained, and he put into operation Britain's system of free medical and dental services. The final ironies of his career lay in the future, when the prosperous electorate repudiated Socialism and bit the hand that fed it. What is more, it bit with Nye Sevan's free false teeth...