Thursday 1 December 2022

Folk With Faith Left To Fight For It

Right when we are being bounced into assuming the inevitability of a three-figure Labour majority, the articles are appearing about how the National Health Service was a bad idea in the first place and ought to be privatised. Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting are the health privateers’ best hope since the NHS was founded.

Did Aneurin Bevan ever say, “The NHS will last as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it”? The world divides between those who insist that, since nothing exists until some luvvie says it or does it, that line originates in a 1997 television play by one Trevor Griffiths, and those who know that Griffiths got it from the old Bevanites in the Welsh coalfields during the Strike.

The miners were entirely matter-of-fact that they had heard Bevan say it on a number of occasions. That was why it appeared, as it still does appear, over his name and under his picture on numerous trade union banners and elsewhere. Those date from long before 1997, of all years. Aged 20 in 1997, even I had first heard it at least five years before that.

Therefore, “Nye never said that” is a shibboleth among those who were tellingly never told that you must never call him “Nye”. It is a vital dividing line between those who do, and those who do not, regard working-class culture, and therefore also working-class politics, as having any validity in its own right. It is always the sign of people who hate the NHS, and who hate the people to whom he did say it. 

Bevan said it repeatedly, even habitually, to the South Wales miners, and they put it on banners and so on even while he was still alive. Some London playwright or other eventually got it off them, but who cares? Avoid at all costs anyone who ever tries to tell you that somehow Griffiths made it up, a claim that I am not aware that he himself has ever made. That is the textbook definition of the metropolitan liberal elite. It is the mark of the enemy, and the enemy must be destroyed.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

6 comments:

  1. One can only hope. As Oxford political scientist and historian Professor Vernon Bogdanor wrote, (The nationalised NHS model was doomed from the very start): “Aneurin Bevan, the Labour health minister, based the NHS on two principles which remain at its heart: that it be financed wholly out of taxation and that the hospitals be nationalised. The first principle limits the money available, while the second institutionalises a culture of complaint. From its inception, the NHS complained of underfunding. Demand for health care, after all, is almost unlimited thanks to new technologies and an ageing population. Bevan believed that, since demand was nearly unlimited, health should remain free from any Treasury restrictions. Unsurprisingly, other ministers did not agree, and Bevan resigned in 1951 when Labour introduced charges for false teeth and spectacles.

    Tony Benn opposed Bevan. Displaying a wisdom later to desert him, he declared: “On this question of ‘principle’ of a free health service, it is nonsense ... It is a practical matter. There is only one test we can apply and it is an overall one ‘with what we have and can get by way of revenue, how can we lay it to the best advantage of those who need it most?””

    If a National Food Service had been established in 1948 we would now also have to queue for low quality, rationed and monotonous produce.”

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    1. Bogdanor has not always been an old grifter. He has not always been old.

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  2. You'll have got under everyone's skin with this.

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  3. Pathetic response to the historical facts I posted above (none of which is in dispute). The NHS is among the most expensive and worst model of healthcare in the developed world for those reasons.

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    1. All that you did was copy and paste from an old grifter's latest piece of grift. Tellingly, the piece that he has taken down off the shelf when it looks as if Starmer and Streeting might win. That was what the Telegraph paid him for. The old grifter's heating allowance goes only so far.

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