The late Captain Tom Moore is back in the headlines but not in a good way. A highly critical Charity Commission inquiry report concluded that the family members who set up the Captain Tom Foundation in 2020 repeatedly blurred their private interests with those of the charity while gaining “significant” personal benefit.

However disturbing this may be, there is in my view a much more dangerous blurring which made me feel very uneasy when Captain Tom was doing his impressive and very media friendly walking in the garden. It is the blurring of the distinction between raising money for the NHS and raising money for NHS charities. NHS staff and the charities themselves are well aware of the difference but most of the mainstream media gave the impression that donation to Captain Tom’s fund was helping the NHS or saving the NHS.

I was born a couple of years before the advent of the NHS. The GP who supervised my mother’s home birth waived his fee. This was not just because we lived in the poorest part of Newcastle upon Tyne. He had huge respect for my father who had spent five years of the war in a Polish prison camp as well as for my mother to whom he got engaged before he was called up for military service.

I was brought up hearing stories about hospitals that were dependent on charitable donations and doctors “on the panel” who devoted less time to the healthcare of panel patients than they gave to private patients. The limited National Health Insurance scheme oversaw the payment by workers of a small sum deducted from weekly pay packets but the dependents of insured workers did not have a right to consult panel doctors. Sometimes friendly societies could offer help to those who paid a weekly subscription but for many in Newcastle’s West End paying the subs was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

Those of Captain Tom’s generation still alive will have some personal memories of pre-NHS medical care but they are inevitably steadily reducing in number, rather like those who can remember serving in the armed forces during World War II.

My unease about Captain Tom’s efforts is probably consistent with my refusal to stand on the doorstep and clap for the NHS. This is not just because ignoring requests from Boris Johnson is a legitimate ethical and political rule of thumb! I saw it as an insult to NHS who deserved much, much more than a handclap and a distraction from years of neglect.

We really must stop treating the the NHS as a religion which is exempt from hard questions – I would say that wouldn’t I? Meanwhile we can do without government ministers using it as an excuse for inaction in other areas. And is our Health Secretary in order bringing it into the debate about assisted dying?

We know that the National Health Service is on its knees and we need to face the harsh realities with clear eyes, including a recognition of creeping privatisation. Full marks to our Party Leader for doggedly returning to the care agenda and how it relates to what happens in hospitals. Come what may, we need cross party conversations about the funding of both with a clear sense of the boundaries between the work of charities and the tax funded agencies of government.

* Geoff Reid is a retired Methodist minister and Bradford City Councillor 2010-2022 who now lives in Barnsley.