R.I.P the NHS: 1948-2012

March 21, 2012

I think we knew, deep down, that the post-Thatcher Conservative Party was one that was determined to eventually kill the NHS, and so exact their revenge for 1945 – and last night, drowned in the sound of cut-glass jeers of Tory MPs, they eventually did kill it. Of course, that’s not really a surprise, but what is surprising, nay, scandalous, is that the NHS was killed with the help of the heirs of the great William Beveridge.

In the now familiar fit of capitalist-realist rhetoric, we were assured by Lansley that there was no alternative, and that if we cared for the NHS, then, well, we’d kill it. This is a bill that allows 49% of services to be carried out private and for profit; that countless professional bodies have disparaged; that essentially ends the government control over the NHS. Years ago, some Tory, might have been Portillo, was overheard saying that the NHS would become a state health insurer, and that seems to be what has happened. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that Blair’s Thatcherite Labour Party wasn’t at best complicit in all this.

There’s almost no legal doubt that selling off NHS services will open the ‘NHS’ (if one can really continue to call it that) up to European Competition Law, which would make it almost impossible for Andy Burnham to make good on his pledge to repeal the bill. There’ve been 1000 amendments tabled against the bill – the current fig leaf of the Liberals, but the basic purpose has remained unchanged – to bring the free market and privatisation to every corner of the NHS. The fact is that the NHS does not belong to the Tories for them to sell it; they won a mere 36% of the vote, and they’re propped up by the Lib-Dems, a party that one might hope would know the value of the NHS.

I wish I could write more, but all I can really do is shake my head and bemoan the end of something that sometimes seemed more of a part of British culture than the monarchy. Nye Bevan, the Secretary of State for Health who created the NHS back in 1948 once said that ‘The NHS will continue to exist as long as there are folk left to defend it’, and so the NHS, like almost everything in British history, eventually went out – to quote T.S. Eliot – ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’

8:00pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZDZu3yILgOM5

(Notes: 57)