Column

Who killed the NHS?

Eric the Heretic points the finger of guilt

Everybody knows the answer to that one -- the Tories! And hanging’s too good for them, after what they’ve done to our beloved health service!

But hold on a moment. Before you knot the noose, think about it. There’s a couple of things wrong with that argument.

First -- what were you doing when the NHS was being killed? Were you saying there wasn’t much wrong with the health service a quick injection of cash couldn’t cure? The Tories liked that line -- they told it over and over again to prove how insensitive the ‘friends’ of the NHS were, how stupid about money, and how inefficient too. After all, if you used the NHS there was a fair chance you’d know about a different NHS: an unresponsive monolith that made people fit its routines. If you worked for it, you’d certainly know about it.

Or did you do nothing? Well, there’s the apathy the NHS breeds. All talk and no action, you lefties, waiting for nanny to do the dirty work. Expecting someone else to sort it all out for you, as usual, then complaining when the tough guys -- Kinnock’s New Model Labour Party this time -- turn out weaker than you expected.

Or were you waving banners, marching about and drawing everyone’s attention to the plight of the NHS? Recruiting sergeants for the Right, to a politicised man and woman. For every citizen you made indignant at the damage done to their health service, you worried two into thinking of alternatives for themselves or their families. BUPA needed the demos, as free advertising, and the Tories needed the worry. Chanting socialists are their own worst enemies, and among the health service’s worst too.

I’ll give you an example: a poster produced by one trade union showed a hand waving above the waves over the slogan ‘Save our health service !’. So what do you do if you think the NHS is going under? Play make believe and throw it a lifeline, imagining you could haul it out of the water? Or cut and run? Changing anything in the NHS requires superhuman effort -- ask any of the workers -- so how can it be saved? The real message of the poster disarmed the same people it was supposed to galvanise into action.

So, in fact, the defenders of the NHS were accomplices to its murder. An uncomfortable thought? There’s worse to come.

Who says the NHS was killed at all? It’s still alive and kicking, and there’s a long way to go before it’s buried. The hand waving desperately above the waves didn’t show the truth at all, it just demoralised the onlookers.

People who believe the health service can be privatised, or will collapse, or some such Domesday scenario, are just showing their political ignorance. It’s not just Essex Man who has been americanised into a self-centred, vacuous, apolitical consumer. There’s not much thinking going on among the right-ons either, which is why they idealised the NHS and were left in the lurch by Labour’s failure to kick the Tories out.

If the truth be known, you lefties think the NHS is a great thing because you know so little about it. If it survives in the future, it will be despite your support.