DaisyAnneReturns
So let's take one of your examples, Glorianny
The NHS was not brought about by gradual change, ...
The NHS started on 5 July 1948. Are you suggesting that someone had the idea on 4 July 1948 and that all the planning, law-making, employment contracts, hospitals, etc., were ready the next day?
You seem to know little about the long march towards the NHS. The ideas can be traced back to the 1900s and the Minority Report headed by Beatrice Webb for the Poor Law Commission promoting "a state-run medical system".
As a founding member of the Fabian Society Beatrice, with Sidney Webb, wrote the original Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution. I would have thought you might have come across her.
Planning for real started in the 1930s when 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. By the time the Second World War broke out, the London Council was running the largest public service of its kind for healthcare.
By 1941, the Ministry of Health was in the process of agreeing a post-war health policy with the aim that services would be available to the entire general public. A year later the Beveridge Report put forward a recommendation for “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services” and was supported across the House of Commons by all parties. Eventually, the Cabinet endorsed the White Paper put forward by the Minister of Health Henry Willink in 1944, which set out the guidelines for the NHS. The principles included how it would be funded from general taxation and not national insurance. Everyone was entitled to treatment including visitors to the country and it would be provided free at the point of delivery. These ideas were taken on by the next Health Minister Aneurin Bevan.
So I would very much disagree that plans, laws and implementation can come newly hatched on the day a party enters government.
You appear to have gone into your standard attack mode. Why do you think I neither know nor care about the growth in homelessness and the poverty children live in? You shout, but what does your shouting achieve? Where I have the skills I help.
No one has proposed we "do things gradually". Making up others' words does not help any argument you may put forward.
Planning, drawing out objectives, forming strategies, designing messaging and how to finance the plan, will all have been going on since the early days of Starmers leadership.
Your only real issue is that they haven't told you, me or anyone else what they are. Quite right too. The first step is to actually form a government. Until that happens there is no next step.
(Sources: various)
I suppose you could see the organisation of London hospitals as an attempt to provide a service, but in fact Bevan viewed local authority control as damaging to a National Health Service The Bevan solution, opting for a regional scheme rather than one based on local authority boundaries, was a work of genius. The key was the realisation that, without executive control of both the voluntary and the municipal hospitals, effective hospital planning was impossible. It was like a breath of fresh air to the officials involved, Sir Wilson Jameson, the CMO, who had an instinct for what was required, George Godber who did the medical drafting and John Horton and John Pater who dealt with administrative issues. The regional concept brought together service considerations (the natural territory within which normal and highly specialised services could best be organised) and the university medical schools (the natural centres of research, development and education). These would ‘fertilise’ the services in the surrounding areas.77 Indeed it was difficult to conceive of a region without a medical school, and vice versa. With university and medical concurrence, regions could establish an integrated specialist system and rationalise nurse training. Bevan’s regions were sizeable; large regions were less likely to attempt detailed local control, but any high degree of local autonomy might have prevented the region from organising a coherent service. Boards had to have the ability to close, amalgamate and expand hospitals. If the boards were too weak, the anarchy of the old voluntary system would begin all over again
Of course there had been some medical provision, but the nationalisation of hospitals and health services, the adoption of responsibility for the nation's health by the government and the coordination of all services in a single Act passed in 1946 was a radical change. Nothing which came before in any way resembled it. www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/
