Andrew Vine: Political bickering insults those who built our NHS

Getting on for half a century later, perhaps fittingly given his devotion to the NHS, his life drew to its close in a hospital where he was cared for with all the compassion and concern for his dignity he unvaryingly displayed to his own patients across the decades.

In mourning him, there was a particular comfort to be drawn from knowing that the values he exemplified endured in staff who had not been born when he first began nursing.

He was of an age and from a background that knew only too well the need for an NHS. Doctors were not for the poor mining community where he grew up between the wars. Treatment cost money unless charity stepped in and lives could be cruelly foreshortened for those who did not have it.

Those memories drove his generation. In his professional world, patients always came first, above disputes and arguments over pay or hours. Look after the sick, then have the arguments later.

That is why, if he were alive today, he would have been equally appalled at the prospect of junior doctors going on strike again, and the failure of the Government to sort this dispute out.

Politicisation of the NHS infuriated him. He’d seen too much of it – the service pulled this way and that by vested interests or political dogma, and in one sense I’m glad that he’s not around to see how bad it has become.

From Tony Blair’s cynical “24 hours to save the NHS” slogan on the eve of his 1997 landslide to Labour’s intention to “weaponise” healthcare for gain in last year’s general election, a service that should be above politics is constantly used as a battering-ram.

The current dispute between the British Medical Association and the Government over junior doctors is at least in part politically motivated by antipathy towards the Conservatives

And just to prove how internal factions within the NHS can dish it out to whoever displeases them, Mr Blair left office in 2007 after investing record amounts in healthcare with accusations ringing in his ears from the BMA that his Government had failed to engage with doctors.

But then the destructive politicisation of the NHS goes back to its very beginnings. It’s worth recalling that the BMA which is now so vocal about threats to the NHS was initially vehemently opposed to its formation, voting overwhelmingly against it because of the loss of private income, and never mind about the poor of the mining communities or other industrial areas.

In an intervention that would make even the hardest-hearted of today’s political spin-doctors wince, the association’s long-serving secretary, Dr Alfred Cox, wrote that it was “uncommonly like the first step, and a big one, towards National Socialism as practised in Germany”.

The good doctor was to sink yet further. The NHS would make the Minister of Health a “Medical Fuhrer”. The Nazi analogies were spectacularly inappropriate, and in appalling taste, 
for a country which still bore the scars and mourned the dead of the Second World War.

The then Minister of Health so shamefully compared to a dictator was one of the most towering and passionately democratic figures ever produced by the Labour movement, Aneurin Bevan, now universally honoured as the NHS’s political father.

In turn, he had short shrift for the BMA, branding them “this small body of politically poisoned people”.

My father remembered all that. Such mutual mud-slinging did nothing to help his patients, nor did any of the decades of wrangling that followed, particularly the weary, discredited claim that the “Tories want to destroy the NHS”.

If so, they’re taking an awfully long time about it, given their first period in power after its formation began in 1951, and they have been in Government for many more years than Labour since then.

There is no doubt that the junior doctors have a point in their dispute and no question that the BMA is sincere in the concerns it expresses about the NHS.

But the central challenge facing the service – an expanding population that is growing older and requires more care as it lives longer – needs to trump all else, and it is long overdue for a consensus to emerge on the best way to meet it.

Both the major parties have tried to reform the NHS and enable it to meet that challenge in recent years, and both to an extent have failed, which makes the relentless bickering over who cares more – or in whose hands it is safe – utterly redundant.

The sight of doctors on strike is an unsettling one. Once the dispute is resolved, as it must be, all sides would be well advised to resolve to take the politics out of the NHS and concentrate instead on working together to cure its ills.


TOMORROW: Bernard Ingham on the difficult questions which are critical to the future health of the NHS.