Healthy Politics

Today's anniversary of the foundation of the National Health Service ought to be the United Kingdom's National Day, to be kept as fulsomely as the Fourth of July was kept in the United States.

Labour thinks that the creation of the NHS is its trump card. But quite apart from the fact that it happened 72 years ago, it had been in all three of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative manifestos in 1945, meaning that it would have happened anyway, no matter who had won.

All of the Beveridge stuff was like that, while the Butler Act had already been enacted. Do look up the party of which Butler was a member. The thing that required a Labour Government was the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy.

In any case, Labour's rather more recent contribution to the NHS was to begin the process of privatising it. The entire concept of NHS privatisation used to exist only on the outermost fringes of Loony Right pseudo-academia. But then came Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan, who set about it so zealously that even the Conservatives ended up having to accept it.

With Lisa Nandy's call for a statue of Blair in Parliament Square, consider that Blair won all three of General Elections into which he led his party, whereas Winston Churchill lost two out of three. But the measure of a Labour Leader is not to have become Prime Minister, as hardly any of them has ever done, but to have changed the party the Leader of which almost always is the Prime Minister.

On everything else, Blair turned Labour into the Conservative Party that by 1997 he had been observing across the House of Commons for at least 10 years, even if it sometimes sold itself in other terms to the country at large; there is nothing new in Labour voters being more conservative than Conservative MPs. But on NHS privatisation, Blair truly changed the Conservative Party.

As Attlee, following his famous victory 75 years ago today, had forced that party to accept the economic policy for a generation, and the foreign policy apparently for all time, of the best Government in British history and the worst British Government in world history. As Callaghan's turn to monetarism in 1976 had made it possible for Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe to present their reluctant party with a fait accompli. 

And as Jeremy Corbyn's near-victory in 2017, followed by his defeat only over the issue of Brexit in 2019, have compelled Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to recognise that General Elections are won and lost on the votes of those who define themselves as having been kicked in the teeth and left to rot by every previous Government from Callaghan's onwards.

Therefore, the Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.