Nye Bevans legacy came into the world 75 years ago this morning when, then Minister of Health in Attlee’s post-war government, Nye opened Park Hospital in Manchester at a time of rationing and shortages, when we were nearly bankrupt, a jewel that the war generation left us with, an amazing institution for us to all to continue to share.
Nye Bevan, once wrote, “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” This statement, which is at the heart of our health service, still commands support from the vast majority of the UK population. The NHS encapsulates everything which Bevan stood for, and was the culmination of a life devoted to improving the lives of men and women across the country.
For the first-time doctors, nurses, opticians, dentists and pharmacists all worked under one organisation. It was a ray of hope in that bleak time, and it remains one today. The creation of the NHS in 1948 was the product of years of hard work and a motivation from various figures who felt the current healthcare system was insufficient and needed to be revolutionised.
Born in 1948 to a post-war Britain amidst the rubble of war and a skeptical medical profession, the NHS has had its ups and downs over the years. However, its role and importance as a symbol of our Britishness and intense pride in being able to provide universal care, free at the point of delivery, has remained throughout, out of the belief that healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth, with health and care as priorities – not profit, .these ideals remains one of the NHS’s core principles.
Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the National Health Service, 5 July 1948 at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, near Manchester.
These ideas can be traced back to the early 1900s with the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909. The report was headed by the socialist Beatrice Webb who argued that a new system was needed to replace the antiquated ideas of the Poor Law which was still in existence from the times of the workhouses in the Victorian era. Those who were involved in the report believed it was a narrow-minded approach from those in charge to expect those in poverty to be entirely accountable for themselves. Despite the strong arguments provided in the report, it still proved unsuccessful and many ideas were disregarded by the new Liberal government.
Nevertheless, more and more people were beginning to speak out and be proactive, including Dr Benjamin Moore, a Liverpool physician who had great foresight and a pioneering vision of the future in healthcare. His ideas were written in “The Dawn of the Health Age” and he was probably one of the first to use the phrase ‘National Health Service’. His ideas led him to create the State Medical Service Association which held its first meeting in 1912. It would be another thirty years before his ideas would feature in the Beveridge Plan for the NHS.
Few now remember life before the NHS. Until 4 July 1948, every visit to a GP or hospital had to be paid for, unless covered by insurance or charity. Workers paid National Insurance but their dependents weren’t covered. Many families couldn’t afford private insurance, weren’t poor enough for ‘charity’, so suffered without health care. In some cases local authorities ran hospitals for the local ratepayers, an approach originating with the Poor Law. By 1929 the Local Government Act amounted to local authorities running services which provided medical treatment for everyone. On 1st April 1930 the London County Council then took over responsibility for around 140 hospitals, medical schools and other institutions after the abolition of the Metropolitan Asylums Board.
The idea of a state-run health service was mooted at the Labour Party Conference in 1934 by the then president of the Socialist Medical Association, Dr Somerville Hastings. Then the Beveridge Report of December 1942 called for 'Comprehensive Health and Rehabilitation Services' and set the seeds for the creation of the NHS and the creation of the Welfare State. Winston Churchill's attitude was one of ambivalence and when two years after the Beveridge report and it had become Labour Party policy, he became markedly more hostile. It was then Aneurin Bevan who wholeheartedly embraced and made sure the project was implemented and delivered after he became health minister in 1945.
Born amidst the rubble of war, opposed by churches, charities and doctors – it was a ray of hope in that bleak time, and it remains one today. The free service, based on need, not what money you have, is something that has become cherished by generation after generation. Many see it as Labour’s greatest socialist achievement. Today, we have a lot to thank the NHS for; from the introduction of polio and diphtheria vaccinations to all under 15-year olds to the success of smoking cessation services and cancer screening services, the NHS has been instrumental in many of the medical achievements the UK has seen over the last 74 years,. a shining example of what separates us from the US.
It offered for the first time a free healthcare system in the world that offered for completely free , healthcare that was made available on the basis of citizenship rather than the payment of fees or insurance. It has since played a vital role in caring for all aspects of our nations health. It has been the envy of the world ever since. I am reminded that my quality of life owes more to a dead man than a whole Tory Government ever could ,so thank you Nye Bevan.
Today, nine in 10 people agree that healthcare should be free of charge, more than four in five agree that care should be available to everyone.The NHS remains one of our most precious national assets and is the institution that the public have said makes them most proud to be British. It is built on the effort, skill, and commitment of its staff, the support of patients and service users, and strong relationships with the communities it serves.
The celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS underline the general view that despite its many challenges and crises, few organisations are as admired or respected by the public. It’s certainly hard to think of another public service that would, as it did during the Covid pandemic, get people out on the streets banging saucepans to mark their support.
The deep love we have for our health service is one of the most tremendous aspects of living in Britain. The knowledge that if you ever get ill or have an accident, you’ll get the care you need, whatever your circumstances, is one of Labour’s greatest achievements.
A recent report from The 99% Organisation https://99-percent.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NHS-report-for-print.pdf made clear, the UK's healthcare model is "world-class", and the fundamental structure of the NHS represents the "international gold standard" of healthcare provision. There's a reason that every politician – even the most ardent free-marketeers in British history – at least paid lip-service to its role at the heart of British society.
That's not to say there aren't serious problems. it is remarkable that this cherished institution has endured in the UK despite it being presided over by Tory governments for the vast majority of those years. But the 99% report linked above shows that this has nothing to do with a failure of the NHS model, but a systemic, long-term underfunding and neglect of the service. Against the wishes of the public, politicians in recent years haven't invested in it. For years, they've only pretended to care, clapping for NHS staff while refusing to pay them properly.
Thanks to the Tories, those intervening years have seen so many public institutions sold off to the private sector to the detriment of the quality and value of that service. The NHS has somehow survived. Perhaps the reason for this is the special place it has in the hearts of so many. Most families will have a personal experience of when the NHS came up trumps for them or a family member in their hour of need. I am one of those people.
It wouldn’t be possible to run a 7-day NHS, caring for millions of people day-in-day-out without the hard work and dedication of its staff. Despite all the adversity that’s thrown at them: poor pay, bursary cuts, hospital parking fines and staff shortages to name a few; they continue to become stronger and relentlessly deliver fantastic healthcare to the nation .The recent pandemic have once again highlighted the strength, professionalism , dedication and bravery of our healthcare staff. It is truly inspiring to see how amazing the staff handled the awful situation and it was a testament to every healthcare worker throughout the UK. They are a credit to our nation and we couldn’t be more proud.
The NHS here in Wales employs close to 72,000 staff which makes it Wales’ biggest employer.The NHS in Wales carries out around 360 thousand patient consultations every month in secondary care alone (not including GP visits or diagnostics) There are 79 babies born a day in Wales / with one birth every 18 minutes On average there are over 8,500 occupied NHS beds in Wales every day In the last 12 months, more than 20,000 patients started cancer treatment in Wales,But dedicated, compassionate staff are under increased pressure, leading to low moral. Recent figures have emerged that 2/4s of hospitals have been warned about dangerous staff shortages.
As the Tory's seek to dismantle it, we should not forget Nye Bevan's words who said ' It will last as long as their are folk with enough faith to fight for it. From the cradle to the grave.One can only imagine what Nye’s reaction would be to the current state of his beloved creation, where large bills for dental care are routine, optometry is fielded out to Specsavers, and the decades-long creeping privatisation of hospitals and primary care services has accelerated under the Covid-19 pandemic.
Far from “stuffing their mouths with gold” – as Bevan said of the doctors employed by the NHS at its inception – successive Westminster governments of the last decade have presided over cuts that have decimated the incomes of NHS workers. According to GMB Union, long-serving NHS nurses had by April 2021 suffered a real-terms pay cut of 16.3 per-cent - a loss of just under £6,000. Paramedics and experienced mental health nurses, meanwhile, had each lost just over £7,500.
The strain of these losses has been reflected in the news, with stories of nurses using foodbanks increasingly commonplace. and skipping meals in order to save money or feed their families, along with reports citing struggles with mental health and a poor work/life balance leaving them stressed. tired and overworked. .The Government has also come under fire for the rise in waiting times for various treatments...
On its birthday we should join the call for fair pay for all NHS staff that they so clearly need and deserve- Public sector pay has been capped for too long. This is despite rising inflation and increased living costs. It's not OK that NHS staff like nurses are resorting to food banks to get by and we cannot reach the day again where people make a profit out of our sickness. The NHS is a shining example of how a caring society can create good and safe care based on social solidarity., making such a great contribution towards social and health equality. A beacon to the world.
Thank you to all of those who have worked and who are still working tirelessly to provide the best care to over 64 million people in the UK. putting our communities and patients first - which shine through in the dedicated work of our doctors, nurses and health workers every day. The last 75 years wouldn’t have been possible without them. It is currently though in real danger, under attack from those that want to privatise it, run it down and fragment it ;
When the Government inevitably put out celebratory tweets today remember they are privatising it and with American plutocrats turning their eyes on the NHS, it's more important than ever that we continue to defend it with all we've got, Now, more than ever, it is vital that we stand together to defend our NHS from those who seek to undermine its core values.
Our healthcare service was once ranked the best in the world, but since 2015 it has fallen to 10th place globally and is falling fast. Over the past four decades, politicians have made policy changes to the health service in England that have allowed increasing privatisation, the introduction of an internal marketplace, and the loading of enormous private finance initiative debt upon many NHS trusts. We are now in a situation where thousands of NHS services are outsourced to non-NHS providers. This has atomised the service, damaging the architecture of the system as a whole, disrupting important relationships between people and teams, and creating chaos and bureaucracy, which always accompanies the churn of short-term contracts.
A system that was once whole is thousands of tiny fragments now, some publicly-owned, some run by non-profits and others by profit-making companies.Our public healthcare system is fast collapsing and a two-tier healthcare system is being built in its place, excluding more and more people from the care they need. This past winter the situation was so stark some patients received life-saving treatment on the floor of A&E waiting rooms, behind sheets held up by staff members in a desperate attempt to offer them dignity and privacy.
We are now faced with hundreds of preventable and avoidable deaths happening every week. A major staffing crisis with over 132,000 staffing vacancies, and over 7 million on waiting lists, the longest waiting list in history.. No wonder staff are either leaving their professions or striking to save their pay and conditions and to stand up for the NHS itself.
The situation is not new, because successive governments have been destroying the architecture of the system in incremental ways for a long time. But the lack of investment in the service and real-term pay cuts for staff since 2010 have exposed the resulting problems. As the funding has been pulled back over the past 13 years, the cracks have become visible, sometimes literally. In England, it would cost the NHS roughly £10bn to repair hospitals and equipment, and some of the backlog is putting patients and staff at risk. There have been dozens of recent examples of sewage leaks in wards, maternity units and A&E departments.
Of course, the pandemic has made everything worse. As resources were diverted to enable staff to cope with the worst public health emergency since the NHS began, many operations and clinic appointments were delayed or cancelled. This caused waiting lists to spiral; the situation deteriorated fast. As we watch all of this unfold there are reports that more and more people are turning to private healthcare and there are tragic examples of patients being failed.
We need a fully public NHS – because this is how we protect the pay, conditions and it’s also how we protect it for patients too. It’s the only way the NHS will survive. This isn’t time to ‘reform or retreat’ , it’s time to return to founding principles.We don'r need a new system . we need a new government that wont intentionally destroy it for their own financial benefit.Healthcare must work for people not profit and should be a basic right for everybody and should not be determined by your bank balance. We need to kick out the private companies and kick out private profit.
The situation can feel hopeless. nut we must remember that this decline was not inevitable but is the result of bad policy decisions taken for ideological (or possibly self-interested) reasons. Some see the results as a deliberate choice, intended to wreck the NHS so that an alternative, profit generating service can rise up to take its place. The silver lining is this: if the decline is the result of a deliberate choice not to invest in people, equipment, and buildings, then we can make an equally deliberate choice to mend the NHS and turn it around. it’s important to remember it is reversible, should our politicians choose to take action.
The best way we can mark the 75th anniversary is to vow to remain true to the principles that underpinned the NHS from the beginning – treatment free from private companies and free at the point delivery.Now more than ever we need to fight for an NHS fit to work in and fit for purpose for another 75 years or more. We we must take this opportunity to hold politicians to account and should also ensure that NHS staff receive the pay and conditions they deserve if we are to reward and protect the best thing about it – the people that make it run day-in, day-out.
Under the current climate, it is vital that we stand together to protect our NHS from the proposed changes being made which will drastically affect the core values. We need private outsourcing to be eliminated. We need the PFI debt, which costs us billions every year, to be paid off. We need the staff to be properly supported in pay and in their general workplace conditions.
And once these things are done we need to start imagining an NHS fit for the next 75 years. An NHS where the leadership mirrors the changing demographics of our population, an NHS with the facilities our communities truly need, an NHS where sustainability is at the centre of decision making.A health service where prevention comes first, where care is closer to home, where patients have more control. It means tackling inequality at its root so we make the country fairer and healthier for all.
Sajid Javid has called for a royal commission on the long term future of the NHS.? The NHS is not broken, it is fit for purpose. It is actively being destroyed. 13 years ago it was the best in the world.The Tories took a fully functioning service and defunded it for over a decade.
Sajid Javid is punishing the NHS while wanting to double the salary of those who destroyed it. After years of deliberate Tory underfunding queues of privateers are lining up, rubbing their grubby, dollar-stained mitts at the prospect of making a quick profit at our expense.We see ministers accepting donations from people with clear links to US private health providers, Starmer and Streeting admitting they will use private providers to "reduce" waiting times. Put people before profit. Keep our NHS public.Get the Tories out.
Add your name: Only the NHS trains doctors and nurses, has A&E, and doesn't cherry-pick patients. Private healthcare cannot fix the waiting list crisis. Politicians must invest in our NHS, not in private healthcare:
Sign the card to wish the NHS a happy 75th birthday!
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