Ernest Bevin Quotes

The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil. ERNEST BEVIN, CHURCHILL’S MINISTER OF LABOUR AND NATIONAL SERVICE London,

Il regno dei cieli si fonderà pure sulla giustizia, ma il regno della terra si fonda sul petrolio.

We spent the morning discussing Michael’s role at Tribune, guiding the journal’s policy toward endorsing the creation of NATO and establishing an anti-Communist stance earlier than most other leftwing publications. George Orwell had become a welcome figure to the staff at Tribune, even though readers protested: “Why do you take after the Russians all the time? We’re still allies with them.” Part of Michael’s friendship with Ernest Bevin was founded on their staunchly anti-Communist views, strengthened by their dismay at what happened to Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries that became Soviet satellites shortly after the Yalta agreement.

She sees you in her diaries as this fiery backbencher, and then you get in the cabinet and you’re behaving (to her) differently; that is, you seemed to be more of a compromiser. She found this almost shocking. I don’t find it surprising at all: “If you’re going to be in the cabinet for God’s sakes ... ” I began. Michael finished my sentence: “You have to compromise.” Michael added: “I sometimes said to Jill if I’d had the experience of being in the cabinet before I wrote it [the Bevan biography] I would have written somewhat differently. He was making compromises to get through the main things he wanted. He had to keep on his side people like Dalton and Ernest Bevin. Herbert Morrison was the one who was opposed to the way he [Bevan] was doing the Health Service and he had to be prepared to compromise.

[CR] I was reading another of your books in your library last night—Herbert Morrison’s autobiography. He’s got one paragraph on you. It’s the nastiest piece of business, calling you a TV personality. He doesn’t know if you have any influence on anyone and he refers to your election defeat in Plymouth. He loads it on. Do you remember that? [MF] Ernest Bevin is supposed to have said of Morrison when someone else said, “He’s his own worst enemy,” “not while I’m alive.” Michael had no other comment on Morrison. He rarely spent time on those he disliked.

As the historian Avi Shlaim noted, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin “colluded directly with the Transjordanians and indirectly with the Jews to abort the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

Unbeknown to them, secret negotiations had already been taking place, as early as 1947, before the British Mandate in Palestine ended. These were between King Abdullah and the Zionist leaders, who were united in their goal of preventing the birth of a Palestinian state under their common enemy, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian head of the Arab Higher Committee, which was established on April 25, 1936, and outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official. The British government was continuing with its determined efforts to deprive the Palestinians of their country, exploring the possibility that the Arab parts of Palestine, which it believed would be unviable as an Arab Palestine on their own, could be fused with the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, established in 1946. At a secret meeting in London in February 1948, Ernest Bevin, the UK foreign secretary, gave King Abdullah the green light to snatch part of Palestine provided that the king’s forces stayed out of those areas allotted by the UN partition plan to the Jews.

I serve my castle, Mr Bevin, you serve yours. You think I am dangerous for your castle, and I think you are dangerous to mine.

The British statesmen Ernest Bevin once quipped that “the kingdom of heaven may run on righteousness, but the kingdom of earth runs on oil.