It is not surprising that two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper will be released early when, in a doomed attempt to placate the people who had taken to biting the Police, it was proposed to evict foreign nationals from social housing. That would not expand or improve the stock, which is the problem with what is most certainly not "a safety net for the poor", any more than is the National Health Service, or state education, or public transport, or municipal leisure facilities, or the state pension, all of which would be redefined as such if this were.
"It is entirely undesirable," wrote Aneurin Bevan, "that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street."
In 1979, two fifths of people lived in council housing, an impossible figure for a mere safety net. As recently as 1980, what is now a breathtaking 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing. Now, after four decades of selling off the stock and of not building any more, the stringent criteria for new tenants effectively guarantee a large number of single mothers of dependent children who are thus unable to work full-time, if at all, and of people newly released from prison or newly discharged from psychiatric institutions.
Margaret Thatcher's assault on council housing is the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally. But it created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead people who had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class? Shameless began under Tony Blair's model for the last Labour Government. But supposedly not for this one, so the fight goes on, and it is a fight on many fronts.
Today, we learned that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools were to identify potential future NEETs so that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools could funnel them into a curriculum determined by "local employers" such as vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, Turkish barbers, and American candy shops. Or pack them off to be sexually assaulted from the age of 16 in the tender care of the sacrosanct Ministry of Defence. In the financial year 2024-25, the Government wrote off £6.6 billion of public money, with £1.6 billion of that being mismanagement and cancelled projects at the MoD for which every other Department of State has been ordered to make yet further cuts. And now, did critics of the early release scheme say something about grooming gangs?
Bevan had no problem with "health tourism" either.
ReplyDeleteIndeed:
DeleteOne of the consequences of the universality of the British Health Service is the free treatment of foreign visitors. This has given rise to a great deal of criticism, most of it ill-informed and some of it deliberately mischievous. Why should people come to Britain and enjoy the benefits of the free Health Service when they do not subscribe to the national revenues? So the argument goes.
No doubt a little of this objection is still based on the confusion about contributions to which I have referred. The fact is, of course, that visitors to Britain subscribe to the national revenues as soon as they start consuming certain commodities, drink and tobacco for example, and entertainment. They make no direct contribution to the cost of the Health Service any more than does a British citizen.
However, there are a number of more potent reasons why it would be unwise as well as mean to withhold the free service from the visitor to Britain. How do we distinguish a visitor from anybody else? Are British citizens to carry means of identification everywhere to prove that they are not visitors? For if the sheep are to be separated from the goats both must be classified. What began as an attempt to keep the Health Service for ourselves would end by being a nuisance to everybody.
Happily, this is one of those occasions when generosity and convenience march together. The cost of looking after the visitor who falls ill cannot amount to more than a negligible fraction of £399,000,000, the total cost of the Health Service. It is not difficult to arrive at an approximate estimate.
All we have to do is look up the number of visitors to Great Britain during one year and assume they would make the same use of the Health Service as a similar number of Britishers. Divide the total cost of the Service by the population and you get the answer. I had the estimate taken out and it amounted to about £200,000 a year. Obviously this is an overestimate because people who go for holidays are not likely to need a doctor’s attention as much as others. However, there it is, for what it is worth, and you will see it does not justify the fuss that has been made about it.
The whole agitation has a nasty taste. Instead of rejoicing at the opportunity to practice a civilized principle, Conservatives have tried to exploit the most disreputable emotions in this among many other attempts to discredit socialized medicine.
Naturally when Britons go abroad they are incensed because they are not similarly treated if they need the attention of a doctor. But that also I am convinced will come when other nations follow our example and have health services of their own. When that happens we shall be able to work out schemes of reciprocity, and yet one more amenity will have been added to social intercourse. In the meantime let us keep in mind that, here, example is better than precept.
With my emphasis added, Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear: A Free Health Service, 1952.