Quote:
Originally Posted by Redraine
According to Cashy :- "If were gonna go back in history then the only fact we have an NHS is down to a Labour Government"
Come off it mate! You are accusing Wynonie of being brainwashed, but maybe you should re-read the history. If it hadn't been for Churchill there would have been no NHS.
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.
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.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 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.
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.
These exaggerated claims that the NHS owes its whole creation to the Labour party are only possible through ignorance and misrepresentation of the past, of what was a cross-party consensus. The NHS was Britain’s triumph, not Labour’s.
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This is all very nice; but as history shows, agreements made in wartime are quite often tossed into the garbage can when hostilities cease. One can see several examples of this: The Treaty of London, 1915 was ditched, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916, was implemented at the Paris peace talks of 1919, amidst a dog's breakfast of conflicting assurances: One thinks immediately of the Balfour Declaration, 1917, and the promises make to Sharif Hussein bin Ali.
Anyway, enough of history; anybody with the time to waste can easily inform himself ... the bottom line is that tories are opposed to things like the NHS, whether these tories are your bunch of assholes, or the Republican Party in the USofEh, or our own Conservative Party of Canada. It is up to progressive parties not only to protect, but also expand free, universal health care. In prosperous countries such as the UK free health care should be a right. We might as well add a strong social safety net and all that implies for education and housing. Tories everywhere don't give a flying [deleted] about stuff like this. The only hope for the little guy is a strong, democratic socialist party committed to making things better for everyone ... apart from the very rich who can damn well take care of themselves, and, by the by, pay more taxes on the obscene amount of loot they control.