while I agree with your article is historically correct in most areas I am afraid I cannot agree with your comments with regards to the actions of Churchill in opposition. Churchill personally called upon consultants of their time to vehemently oppose the introduction of the NHS. While it might be true that all parties agreed on some form of medical care for the Nation after the war it did not necessarily mean that the Tories in particular would have seen through a bill creating the NHS, had they won the election. The NHS is the greatest gift this country has been given, no matter who is given the deification for its creation. While it has lost its general direction somewhat due mainly because it has expanded into areas it was never intended for, such as cosmetic surgeries like varicose veins and tummy tucks, infertility treatments and various other types of surgical and medical procedures. These procedures would have been the responsibility of the person seeking that kind of treatment and would have been accessed privately.

Thatcher created a market driven health service one of competing products, she along with her cronies wanted to dismantle the health service, she created highly paid managers who have been about as creative and as useful as a chocolate fireguard. The NHS would be simple to sort out it just needs someone with the courage to do it and return it to what it was created for in the first place, more than 75% of its costs are purely admin and that in-itself makes no sense at all.

To respond to a few of the points raised:

- As I mentioned in the piece, all three parties were completely agreed on some form of national health service. Peter is quite right to say that the Conservatives were conspicuously silent on whether it would be completely ‘free at the point of use’. But then the idea that this was ever delivered as a lasting legacy is an exaggerration as well – Bevan (and the young Harold Wilson) resigned from the government in 1950 in protest at the introduction of prescription charges. We may all agree that prescription charges were (and still are) a relatively small sum, but with their introduction by the same Labour government, the entire ‘free at the point of use’ principle was already hugely compromised.

- Bevan can indeed be credited with the act in its final form, and as Frank has helpfully added, was influenced by the Tredegar scheme. However, the point that needs to be recognised is that the debate had moved on by the post-war era. It was not ‘should we have an NHS?’, but ‘what form should the new NHS take?’ I’m afraid the last couple of postings fall into the fallacy of mythologising the whole debate, and imagining it ran along the former lines, rather than the latter. I suppose it comes partly down to whether you believe the crucial years were c.1945-8 (when the NHS was implemented), or c.1940-4 (when the NHS was conceived, and its adoption widely accepted), as this piece makes a case for.

- And this deification of Bevan – undoubtedly a man of principle – needs to recognise that many of the ‘special interests’ he fought off were as much in the Labour party as in the medical profession, i.e. the serious scepticism among trade unionists that an NHS would provide employers with an excuse to say they were overburdened, and could not afford further wage rises. You can choose to deify Bevan, or deify the Labour party, but not plausibly both, as the former’s triumph was partly over the latter.

- As for the Conservatives voting against the NHS Bill multiple times, this is a bit of a non sequiteur. Like other twentieth century landslides of the left (1906-10, and 1997-2005), the ’45-’50 parliament was a bitterly partisan one – it even started off with Labour and Tory MPs singing ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ to one another, and the newly-elected Tory MP Harry Legge-Bourke throwing a coin at Attlee! There was a deeply ingrained culture among the Tories (who had been used to landslide majorities of their own for the past 14 years) of launching ‘wrecking’ actions against *all* government initiatives, regardless of merit – Churchill argued this was the opposition’s constitutional role. I don’t personally buy this as a justification of what an opposition is there to do, but it was the rationale of the time for the Tories. If you read the policy papers of all three parties, you begin to realise how very similar their own constructive proposals actually were, and that they differed largely in nuance and emphasis.

- As for raising the Tory cuts of the 1980s, that rather misses the whole point of the piece. Above, I have dealt with the birth of what we rightly call the ‘post-war consensus’, and how the NHS came out of that. The Thatcherite Conservatives of the 1980s were wholly committed to breaking up that post-war consensus in all its forms – which is partly why the SDP’s staunch defence of several of the institutions of the post-war consensus prompted the jibe from the Tories that the SDP stood for “Not a better tomorrow, but at least a better yesterday.”

It would be an act of extreme ignorance to call the NHS a sole product of the Conservatives, or a sole product of the Liberals. Unfortunately, it seems to have become socially acceptable to say precisely this about Labour, despite it being palpably untrue. And I suspect the thought of yielding this argument absolutely terrifies the Labour party today, because in losing this, they would lose one of the landmark reasons they give to justify their existence.

For a person who studies history, I wonder who employs you; though I think it’s most likely The Fox Network, because you seem to follow their ‘fair & impartial,’ mantra, i.e. make everything up.

You wrote:

‘The point is that a Conservative post-war government under Churchill was fully signed up to introducing the NHS.’

They didn’t. The Churchill opposition voted against the setting up of the NHS 21 times, including the third reading.

I don’t think it’s a cross-party consensus?

Ever since it’s inception the conservatives have tried to dismantle it, with support from members of your won party & it’s previous incarnations, (as you seem to be a historian, research the ‘Orange Book.’)

If you want to pass your MA, in modern history, it may be a good idea to DO SOME RESEARCH!

To read this article one would think that the NHS was a foregone conclusion, irrespective of which party won the 1945 general election. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tories voted against the formation of the NHS 21 times before the act was passed, including both the Second and Third reading. Do I really need to point out that these are not the actions of a party which supports a measure, but one which opposes it?

Further, having attempted to distort the reality of the opposition to the Labour Government’s introduction of the NHS by pretending that the Conservative’s support was definitively demonstrated by their ’45 manifesto, but not their subsequent actions in Parliament and outside, the author attempts to paint a gloomy picture of Labour support for the NHS by ignoring the actions of others in this regard. No doubt he has his own reasons for doing so, but truth and clarity clearly are not among them.

Not for Seth the campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s by both the Labour Party and the Liberals/SDP/Alliance/Lib Dems to save the NHS from the Tory axe. Oh no, Seth would have you believe that all parties have been equally supportive of the Health Service. That’s as laughable as the notion that the Tories would have introduced the NHS on similar lines as Labour if it had won in ’45.

It saddens me to read such tripe from a member of a party with relatively good history of support for the NHS. I say relatively good because, as those who are willing to accept real history rather than a partisan revision of it will remember, members of both the Tory and Lib Dem Parties claimed that the concept of the NHS – socialised and free at the point of use – was unsustainable in the modern age. Indeed as late as 2004, “Orange Book” Lib Dems had joined the Conservatives in proposing a dismantling of the existing NHS, taking the results of the then Conservative government’s fund-starving as proof of the need to do so.

Labour rejected this notion which is why our 1997 manifesto said simply:

“We will save the NHS”.

We did. The NHS waiting list reached 1 million for the first time in 1993, and although it’s all-time high of 1,263,000 was in 1998, as New Labour took over and struggled to re-float the sinking ship, these indicators of failure have considerably decreased with Labour’s massive injection of funds. Waiting times have plummeted from that record high and, for now at least, it appears that the argument has been won (hence Cameron’s desperate desire to be seen as ‘the party of the NHS’).

But let’s not kid ourselves that the history of the NHS is not one of the left (of which I include the Lib Dems and its previous incarnations) fighting the opposition of the right. There are still large sections of the right who, given a free hand, would be happy to dismantle the NHS. It remains a constant struggle – highlighted by Dan Hannan’s “60 year mistake” attitude – which those who consider themselves progressive must be united in fighting. False divisions, like false logic, do no nobody any good.

As a postscript, in ensuring that this response was accurate I happened across a quote from Bevan ridiculing false logic. It’s apt to reproduce it:

“…they remind me of a famous argument between Chesterton and Belloc. They were arguing about the cause of drunkenness, and they decided to apply the principles of pure logic. They met one night and drank nothing but whisky and water, and they got drunk. They met the next evening and drank nothing but brandy and water, and they got drunk. They met the third night and drank nothing but gin and water, and again they got drunk. They decided that as the constant factor was water it was obviously responsible – a conclusion which was probably most agreeable to Bacchic circles.”

It remains a mystery how much water Seth was drinking when he penned this diatribe.

I would only add that the Tredegar Medical Aid Society which is claimed by Labour in Wales as the forerunner of the NHS was a contributory scheme.

What is conspicuously absent from the 1945 Conservative manifesto is a commitment to make the new health service free to all citizens at the point of use. Given the prevailing scepticism of Tory backbenchers in the 1935 Parliament to the expansion of state welfare provision (including the Beveridge Report), it’s far from clear that a postwar Conservative government would have done more than continue existing trends towards the integration of health services under regional boards, and establish a (means-tested) right for the poorest citizens to receive treatment free of charge.

A Liberal government during the late 1940s would have established something more closely resembling Aneurin Bevan’s NHS, providing treatment for all free at the point of use. But it is worth noting the voluntarist and decentralist tone of the policy paper Health for All, produced by a Liberal sub-committee in the summer of 1942 – that is, whilst the Beveridge Report was still being drafted. Whilst the state would fund the health services through general taxation, Health for All proposed that voluntary hospitals would remain independent, doctors would be able to combine NHS work with private practice, and patients would retain the right to choose their GP. As Elliott Dodds explained in Let’s Try Liberalism (1944), the Liberal policy was framed so that “the widest scope would be left for individual ability, experiment and choice” within the health service. A Liberal health service would probably have achieved similar – or better – outcomes for patients to that which Bevan created, but in structural terms it would not have been the same. Moreover, as with the Conservatives, it is possible that the Liberal commitment to universal free provision might have been whittled away in the context of postwar budgetary constraints.

In short, health reform may have been inevitable at the end of the war, but the creation of the NHS as we have known it certainly was not: the system created in 1948 bore the unmistakable stamp of Aneurin Bevan’s socialism and of the Labour government’s willingness to prioritize health spending in a difficult budgetary environment. Whether this is the right model for health provision today, and whether Andy Burnham and his Labour colleagues are fit heirs of Bevan’s legacy, are other matters entirely.

Sinclair was right-hand man to Churchill throughout the war and the two were close mates – Sinclair as head of the air-force beat off attempts to drop the Spitfire on grounds that it had become outdated. Now fondly regarded as the most iconic machine of the last century, it was the only plane to remain in production after the war had ended. That had a lot to do with Sinclair.

When the new national health service was going through Parliament, the Tories who may well have been sympathetic to the notion in their manifesto, still managed to put up a stout objection in favour of the status-quo.