https://www.libdemvoice.org/setting-the-record-straight-labour-and-the-nhs-15930.html
By Seth Thevoz | Fri 21st August 2009 - 9:20 am
So, it’s the silly season again, and politicians are once more gripped by an irrational argument. No change there.
But for those of us who study history, the latest furore over the NHS is positively nauseating, with people apparently split into the camps of those who decry its very right to exist, and those who suddenly pretend they haven’t spent the last few years grumbling about how it’s in dire need of reform.
Part of this division is built upon a myth – a boil that needs to be lanced. We’re so used to Labour politicians churning out the line that Labour gave us the NHS, that we’ve begun to unthinkingly accept it. When Ian McCartney MP celebrated Labour’s centenary in 2006, he actually shed a tear for the NHS as Labour’s greatest triumph. Anyone familiar with 1940s history will tell you that this version of events is a cruel lie.
The NHS owes its existence to the climate of wartime British politics, not least the vastly expanded access to basic healthcare which came with conscription, and the subsequent rise in expectations. As Paul Addison outlined over 30 years ago in his landmark The Road to 1945, the wartime coalition of 1940-5 fostered a remarkable degree of consensus. In social policy, this resulted in the seminal 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services, chaired by the Liberal economist William Beveridge – better known as the Beveridge Report. In this, Beveridge set out a comprehensive state plan of social care. Section 19 of the report is the first public mention of a “National Health Service.”
The report was enormously influential, and what cannot be stressed enough is that in the subsequent 1945 general election, all three parties endorsed the Beveridge Report.
Revealingly, all three parties had NHS proposals in their 1945 manifestoes. The Conservatives actually had the longest section in their manifesto, pledging:
The health services of the country will be made available to all citizens. Everyone will contribute to the cost, and no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them. We propose to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist, and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation
although they went on to envision it as encompassing voluntary hospitals and university medical research, as well as focussing on maternity care.
The Liberals had the shortest manifesto of the election, making just 20 points, but still placed health as a priority:
People cannot be happy unless they are healthy. The Liberal aim is a social policy which will help to conquer disease by prevention as well as cure, through good housing, improved nutrition, the lifting of strains and worries caused by fear of unemployment, and through intensified medical research. The Liberal Party’s detailed proposals for improved health services would leave patients free to choose their doctor, for the general practitioner is an invaluable asset in our social life.
and in typical Liberal style, they accordingly released a supplementary pamphlet giving detailed proposals for the practical implementation of such a scheme, which nobody read, but was then largely worked into law a year later.
The Labour party, on the other hand, was by far the most ambivalent of the three. It gave a fairly evasive pledge, envisioning the NHS as little more than an advisory body for healthier nutrition and medical research:
By good food and good homes, much avoidable ill-health can be prevented. In addition the best health services should be available free for all. Money must no longer be the passport to the best treatment.
In the new National Health Service there should be health centres where
the people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses. More research is required into the causes of disease and the ways to prevent and cure it.
The point is that a Conservative post-war government under Churchill was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. A Liberal post-war government under Sinclair was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. The NHS was not Labour’s great achievement, it was an inescapable conclusion. And it was only the colossal Labour majority of 1945 which made it possible for Clement Attlee’s government to confidently embark on an NHS scheme that was deeply controversial among its own members.
The Labour party, despite its self-written mythology, was not even a dogged believer in socialism up until this point. Until the 1920s, most of its own MPs saw themselves primarily as workers’ and trade unions’ representatives, and the majority did not consider themselves to be socialists (indeed, with the Fabian Society originally within the Liberal tradition, far more Liberal MPs of the 1900s and 1910s considered themselves socialists than Labour or Lib-Lab MPs did). Furthermore, the Labour party was never particularly interested in social reform before the Beveridge report. Many Labour MPs actually opposed the first state pensions in the 1909 Peoples’ Budget because they thought they would get in the way of demands for wage increases. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31 dismissed talk of such comprehensive extensions of the state as unaffordable, focussing instead on appeasing further trade union claims for wage rises until the Great Depression made that impossible. It wasn’t until a report commissioned by a Conservative-led coalition, and chaired by a Liberal economist, that the Labour party showed any serious inclination towards social reform, and only after the other two parties had embraced it.
If anything, the National Health Service Act 1946 is emblematic of something else – the Labour party’s struggle for a justification to exist in the modern age. Even as early as the 1940s, with the levelling of society during WWII, the justification for a purely class-based party came under question. Labour was in search of themes, and continued to be through much of the twentieth century. Thus we see the natural consequence today, with the farcical sight of Labour MPs wrapping themselves in the flag of the NHS, in historical paroxysms.
These exaggerated claims that the NHS owes its whole creation to the Labour party are only possible through the most colossal ignorance and misrepresentation of the past, of what was a cross-party consensus. The NHS was Britain’s triumph, not Labour’s.
Seth Thévoz is currently completing an MA in Modern History at King’s College London. He writes here in a personal capacity.
By Seth Thevoz | Fri 21st August 2009 - 9:20 am
So, it’s the silly season again, and politicians are once more gripped by an irrational argument. No change there.
But for those of us who study history, the latest furore over the NHS is positively nauseating, with people apparently split into the camps of those who decry its very right to exist, and those who suddenly pretend they haven’t spent the last few years grumbling about how it’s in dire need of reform.
Part of this division is built upon a myth – a boil that needs to be lanced. We’re so used to Labour politicians churning out the line that Labour gave us the NHS, that we’ve begun to unthinkingly accept it. When Ian McCartney MP celebrated Labour’s centenary in 2006, he actually shed a tear for the NHS as Labour’s greatest triumph. Anyone familiar with 1940s history will tell you that this version of events is a cruel lie.
The NHS owes its existence to the climate of wartime British politics, not least the vastly expanded access to basic healthcare which came with conscription, and the subsequent rise in expectations. As Paul Addison outlined over 30 years ago in his landmark The Road to 1945, the wartime coalition of 1940-5 fostered a remarkable degree of consensus. In social policy, this resulted in the seminal 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services, chaired by the Liberal economist William Beveridge – better known as the Beveridge Report. In this, Beveridge set out a comprehensive state plan of social care. Section 19 of the report is the first public mention of a “National Health Service.”
The report was enormously influential, and what cannot be stressed enough is that in the subsequent 1945 general election, all three parties endorsed the Beveridge Report.
Revealingly, all three parties had NHS proposals in their 1945 manifestoes. The Conservatives actually had the longest section in their manifesto, pledging:
The health services of the country will be made available to all citizens. Everyone will contribute to the cost, and no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them. We propose to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist, and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation
although they went on to envision it as encompassing voluntary hospitals and university medical research, as well as focussing on maternity care.
The Liberals had the shortest manifesto of the election, making just 20 points, but still placed health as a priority:
People cannot be happy unless they are healthy. The Liberal aim is a social policy which will help to conquer disease by prevention as well as cure, through good housing, improved nutrition, the lifting of strains and worries caused by fear of unemployment, and through intensified medical research. The Liberal Party’s detailed proposals for improved health services would leave patients free to choose their doctor, for the general practitioner is an invaluable asset in our social life.
and in typical Liberal style, they accordingly released a supplementary pamphlet giving detailed proposals for the practical implementation of such a scheme, which nobody read, but was then largely worked into law a year later.
The Labour party, on the other hand, was by far the most ambivalent of the three. It gave a fairly evasive pledge, envisioning the NHS as little more than an advisory body for healthier nutrition and medical research:
By good food and good homes, much avoidable ill-health can be prevented. In addition the best health services should be available free for all. Money must no longer be the passport to the best treatment.
In the new National Health Service there should be health centres where
the people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses. More research is required into the causes of disease and the ways to prevent and cure it.
The point is that a Conservative post-war government under Churchill was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. A Liberal post-war government under Sinclair was fully signed up to introducing the NHS. The NHS was not Labour’s great achievement, it was an inescapable conclusion. And it was only the colossal Labour majority of 1945 which made it possible for Clement Attlee’s government to confidently embark on an NHS scheme that was deeply controversial among its own members.
The Labour party, despite its self-written mythology, was not even a dogged believer in socialism up until this point. Until the 1920s, most of its own MPs saw themselves primarily as workers’ and trade unions’ representatives, and the majority did not consider themselves to be socialists (indeed, with the Fabian Society originally within the Liberal tradition, far more Liberal MPs of the 1900s and 1910s considered themselves socialists than Labour or Lib-Lab MPs did). Furthermore, the Labour party was never particularly interested in social reform before the Beveridge report. Many Labour MPs actually opposed the first state pensions in the 1909 Peoples’ Budget because they thought they would get in the way of demands for wage increases. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31 dismissed talk of such comprehensive extensions of the state as unaffordable, focussing instead on appeasing further trade union claims for wage rises until the Great Depression made that impossible. It wasn’t until a report commissioned by a Conservative-led coalition, and chaired by a Liberal economist, that the Labour party showed any serious inclination towards social reform, and only after the other two parties had embraced it.
If anything, the National Health Service Act 1946 is emblematic of something else – the Labour party’s struggle for a justification to exist in the modern age. Even as early as the 1940s, with the levelling of society during WWII, the justification for a purely class-based party came under question. Labour was in search of themes, and continued to be through much of the twentieth century. Thus we see the natural consequence today, with the farcical sight of Labour MPs wrapping themselves in the flag of the NHS, in historical paroxysms.
These exaggerated claims that the NHS owes its whole creation to the Labour party are only possible through the most colossal ignorance and misrepresentation of the past, of what was a cross-party consensus. The NHS was Britain’s triumph, not Labour’s.
Seth Thévoz is currently completing an MA in Modern History at King’s College London. He writes here in a personal capacity.
