Veteran campaigner Harry Leslie Smith is old enough to remember what life in Britain was like before the founding of the NHS.
He remembers his early years lived in the brutal grip of poverty, “I came into this world in the rough and ready year of 1923. I’m from Barnsley, and I can tell you that my childhood, like so many others from that era, was not like an episode from Downton Abbey.
“Instead, it was a barbarous time, it was a bleak time and it was an uncivilised time, because public health care didn’t exist.
“My memories stretch back almost 100 years, and if I close my eyes, I can smell the poverty that oozes from the dusty tenement streets of my boyhood.”
Harry recalls how his eldest sister, Marion, had wasted and died from tuberculosis at the age of 10 and was “dumped nameless into a pauper’s pit”. He also recalls the “anguished cries” of a woman dying from cancer who could not afford morphine. (Independent newspaper – 24 September 2014)
My own memories are very different to Harry’s. Born in the post war year of 1951, three years after the founding of the NHS in 1948, we were dirt poor and in my early years we lived in what were called prefabs, built to address the housing crisis in Britain under the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944. When I was 4 or 5 we moved into a newly built semi detached council house with gardens front and back, which were a wonder to us all.
Visits to the doctor were not easy or comfortable. Our family doctor was, I suspect, a reluctant conscript to the NHS, one of its many opponents that Aneurin Bevan fought so hard against to win health care for us all, free at the point of use. His surgery and he were austere, both exuding a distant superior paternalism, and his bedside manner was non-existent. We were definitely not of his class and entered his surgery like poor penitents, but we had a doctor without the fear of having to find fees we could never have afforded.
I remember my first major operation as a young child as a terrifying experience, not least because the only aid in dealing with the pain on removing stitches from the inside of my penis was a leather belt in my mouth to protect my teeth. I was no fun, but it was life saving and we even had a ‘home help’ who patiently accompanied me to the loo me to encourage me to agonisingly pee what felt like razor blades for some weeks after the operation.
That was all many years ago and patient care is very different now and no one, thankfully, has to chew leather belts any more, yet the NHS that we know and love, and have somewhat taken for granted, is now under threat and is presently in critical danger of being returned to the bad old days of an entirely privatised health care system and an insurance based payment system. As in the US such a payment system will be a tiered system in which the poorest will lose out and it will be driven by profit, not care. The man driving this desecration and wanton destruction of our NHS is, of course, Jeremy Hunt, the man who is currently at war with junior doctors.
Hunt’s battle against junior doctors for a 7 day NHS which we already have, has been conducted through lies and deceit to impose a contract which will involve junior doctors working longer hours for less pay when they are already stretched to the limit. Instead of taking the route of investing in more training and recruitment, Hunt is insisting that an NHS already at breaking point, due to government imposed underfunding and cuts, must do more with less. Only last month (January 2016) hospitals were being told to shed staff to rescue the NHS from the acute funding crisis imposed by the government.
Talking heads accuse people of loving the NHS and of being driven by their emotions and not the cool heads and dispassionate reason needed for the tough love required in these austere times.
I would argue the opposite, these are the times that require passion and the expression of love for an institution on which our lives depend when we are at our most vulnerable and helpless. The cuts being applied to the NHS are ideological and politically motivated cuts.
We can, apparently, afford a Trident nuclear deterrent and £178 billion investment on defence. We can afford £85 billion in corporate handouts and to cut corporation tax. The bank of England can print £375 billion of new money in Quantitative Easing and give it to the banks, but we cannot afford our NHS? I think not.
The government has created the ideology of strivers and shirkers and the unworthy poor. Is it fair, the rhetoric goes, that hard working tax payers should pay for the poor and needy, the sick and vulnerable, the unsustainable elderly and the wheel chair bound disabled? A rhetoric picked up avidly by the right wing press and its readers. Heaven spare me from the strident morally indignant protestations of the righteous and the financially emotionally neutered and comfortably dumb, including many politicians.
A society which presumes itself to be civilised is not civilised in which its most vulnerable members are abandoned. Are we to pretend that that society which cares most gives least? Yet that is the Britain we face today.
The NHS is Britain’s biggest employer, if Cameron wants to create jobs, the NHS is crying out for them and every NHS job created benefits everyone in society. A publicly owned and funded NHS is not there to make a profit for private corporations, it is there for each and every one of us when we need it. It is a huge and vital part of the greater British safety net and carries a message for every one of us and to each other, if you fall, we will catch you. Whether passionate or dispassionate, that just makes sense and that is what we should be fighting for because that is what Jeremy Hunt and the Conservative party are tearing apart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0FIFsgxJV4
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/hospitals-told-cut-staff-nhs-cash-crisis
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-pledges-178-billion-investment-in-defence-kit
https://positivemoney.org/2014/06/waste-375-billion-failure-quantitative-easing-video/
