On my mind

IT seems that in England Prime Minister Boris De Pfeffel-Cummings is planning to use new health legislation to impose ministerial control over the NHS and an overhaul of its structures. We always knew that his party, having voted against Nye Bevan’s NHS 72 years ago, would always look for ways to undermine and deconstruct it.

Now previous writings and speeches of De Pfeffel (pre-Cummings) have revealed his wish for an extension of charges for certain services, free care only for those who are genuinely sick (whatever that means) and for the elderly, and a break-up of the “monopolistic” NHS, which he thought had become a religion.

Understandably, many have seen this as a move towards ‘checking the purse before the pulse’ in an insurancebased system, which is a direct attack on Nye’s NHS principle of healthcare free at the point of delivery based on need and not wealth.

In devolved Wales we can surely never negate the outcome of the battle with the BMA and the Tories which allowed Nye to introduce a system of health care which took the fear out of the possible consequences of illness.

In his recently republished 1952 book ‘In Place of Fear’, he had proclaimed that “the essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not advantaged”.

At a time when affordable medical care was a hit-and-miss mixture of insurance companies and charities, what was needed was a system to ensure that all had access when ill to the best that medical skill can offer.

Amid the 1948 mud slinging the communal principles of the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ defeated the individualism of the ‘organised Spivs’, and so it should always be.