Aneurin “Nye” Bevan was the most important leader of the Labour Party’s left wing during the 1940s and ’50s, and he remains an iconic figure today. Rising from a background in the Welsh mining valleys to become a government minister and the principal architect of the National Health Service (NHS), he challenged those, such as his great rival Hugh Gaitskell, who wanted to scrap Labour’s commitment to social ownership of industry.

Bevan’s 1952 work, In Place of Fear, has long been a source of inspiration for the British left. It laid out a blueprint (or perhaps “redprint”) for his vision of a socialist society. It also served as a defense of the reforms carried out by the 1945–1951 Labour government in which Bevan had played a key part, serving as minister for health.

In Place of Fear was a wide-ranging work. It addressed health and housing — the areas for which Bevan had been primarily responsible as a minister — but went beyond those limits to act as a distillation of Bevan’s philosophy as it applied to economics, the nature of society, and much else besides. It was a testament to Bevan’s unswerving belief that collective problems required collective solutions while remaining mindful at all times of how they affected the individual.