Anger over plan to build explosives factory near site where Aneurin Bevan’s ashes were scattered

Martin Shipton

Campaigners have expressed their anger at plans to build an explosives factory close to the moorland site where NHS founder Aneurin Bevan’s ashes were scattered after his death in 1960.

The ashes of his wife Jennie Lee were scattered in the same location after she died in 1988.

Nation.Cymru revealed last week how one of Wales’ best-known landowners is seeking to establish an explosives factory in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park.

Former Welsh Guards officer Harry Legge-Bourke, who owns the Glan Usk Estate near Crickhowell where the annual Green Man Music Festival is held, hopes to build the factory beyond Trefil, a small village near Tredegar at the northern end of Blaenau Gwent and close to the southern border of the national park. It would supply the armed forces.

The plan, which has yet to be submitted to the national park authority, has been opposed by local residents and campaigners.

Adam Johannes, joint secretary of the campaign group Cardiff Stop The War, said: “There is a particular irony in proposing an explosives factory on the land above Trefil. It is where Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee chose to have their ashes laid.

“Their lives belonged to a movement which believed that the wealth and ingenuity of society should be devoted to enlarging human life, not narrowing it through fear and war. They devoted their lives to expanding human possibilities through health, education, culture and social security.

“To turn this landscape into a place for producing explosives would represent a very different idea of what our wealth, our skills and our land are for.

“Aneurin Bevan was no pacifist, but as the Cold War began, he fought for ‘welfare, not warfare’, challenging the diversion of public money from the new welfare state into the arms race.

“Famously, as founder of the NHS, he resigned from the Government in outrage when charges for dental work and spectacles were reintroduced to help pay for Britain’s involvement in the Korean War.

“For Bevan, this betrayed the NHS’s founding principle of universal healthcare, free at the point of use and funded by general taxation.

“Jennie Lee spent her political life arguing that socialism should expand human possibilities by fighting poverty, widening education and giving people a greater share of society’s wealth and power.

“As Britain’s first Minister for the Arts, she pioneered radical ideas and values around art for the many, not the few, and was a driving force behind the creation of the Open University.

“A national park represents the idea that some landscapes are worth protecting from becoming commodities, industrial sites or simply raw material for somebody else’s purpose.

“It is worth remembering that the 1945 Labour Government – that Aneurin Bevan was part of – recognised this when it passed the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, protecting these places while giving ordinary people the right to walk them and enjoy them.

“The Act provided for National Parks, public paths, access to open country, nature reserves and the preservation of natural beauty. An explosives factory belongs to a very different idea of what land is for.

‘Instruments of destruction’

“There is something profoundly wrong with a society that tells its people that the road to prosperity lies through the manufacture of ever more instruments of destruction.

“We have heard the argument before, in one form or another: that armaments bring employment, that preparation for war brings security, that the military machine must be fed because otherwise workers will suffer.

“But what kind of security requires us to manufacture the means of killing? What kind of prosperity depends upon the preparation for catastrophe?”

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