Latest news with #AneurinBevan
Sky News
4 days ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Eighty years on from Labour's landslide, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza brings Clement Attlee's failure on Israel and Palestine to mind
Here's one for the aficionados: 26 July 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of Labour's landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Trade unionists and Labour MPs are celebrating, claiming the nation still owes a debt of gratitude for the historic achievements of Clement Attlee's government. Yet today, as the world watches the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with horror, it's worth recalling that one of Attlee's biggest failures was his Israel - Palestine policy. (Oh, and while Attlee's health minister Aneurin Bevan boasted he "stuffed their mouths with gold" to overcome doctors' opposition to the NHS, today doctors are on strike over pay again.) The 1945 election took place on 5 July, the same date Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Street last year. But with British armed forces still serving overseas in 1945, it took until 26 July to declare the result. 9:30 Labour won 393 seats in 1945, compared with 411 last year. But while Sir Keir's Labour only won 34% of the votes, Mr Attlee won nearly 50%. But then, there was no insurgent Reform UK back then. Celebrating the 80th anniversary, Joanne Thomas, who became general secretary of the shopworkers' union Usdaw in April this year, said the Attlee government left a lasting legacy. "Usdaw's predecessor unions were proud to play a role in the 1945 election victory and to see 18 of our members elected," she said. "Not least a hero of our union 'Red Ellen', a fiery trade union organiser who led the Jarrow hunger march and went on to serve as education minister." Wilkinson was indeed red. Attlee biographer Trevor Burridge wrote: "Ellen Wilkinson was made minister of education despite the fact that she had actively campaigned against his leadership." She was MP for Jarrow, not a million miles from the current education secretary and Starmer super-loyalist Bridget Phillipson's Houghton and Sunderland South constituency. But not even her best friends would call her red! Ellen Wilkinson was also the only woman in Attlee's 1945 cabinet. Last year, Sir Keir made history by appointing 11 women to his cabinet. Labour MP Marie Tidball, elected last year, joined the tributes to Attlee. "He transformed Britain for working people and this legacy laid the foundations for Britain today - our NHS, welfare state and homes for heroes. "Those public services meant I could grow up to fulfil my potential. Labour legend." But if Attlee's NHS, welfare state and nationalisation are viewed as successes by Labour trade unionists and MPs, his government's policy on Palestine is widely agreed to have been a failure. In his acclaimed biography of Attlee's foreign secretary, "Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill", former Blairite cabinet minister Andrew Adonis wrote: "Why did Bevin get Israel/Palestine so wrong?" Adonis says Bevin's policy on Palestine "led to the precise opposite of its declared intention of stability and the peaceful co-existence of the Jewish and Palestinian communities within one state at peace with its neighbours". He concluded: "Instead, Bevin's legacy was a Jewish state of Israel, much larger than even most of its advocates previously favoured, in periodic war and perpetual tension with both its Palestinians and its Arab neighbours." Where did Bevin go wrong? Adonis wrote: "In the first place, because, during the three key years 1945-48, he did not agree that his central policy objective was 'good relations with the United States'." As Sir Keir Starmer prepares to meet Donald Trump in Scotland, 80 years after the historic Attlee victory, that's clearly not a mistake the current Labour PM has made in his relations with the US president. " I like your prime minister," the president said as he arrived in Scotland, "he's slightly more liberal than I am, but I like him". So, 80 years on from Attlee, lessons have been learned. So far, so good, that is.
Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Health
- Hindustan Times
Why are British doctors so radical?
PICTURE THE British Medical Association (BMA), the main doctors' union, and you may imagine a professional body of tweed-wearers. It is more like a giant version of Extinction Rebellion, albeit ready to block health care, not roads. Its latest strike, a five-day walkout by resident (formerly known as junior) doctors, is to start on July 25th. How did they get so radical? The union has long been a nuisance for governments. Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service (NHS), called it a 'small body of politically poisoned people'. Yet strikes by doctors were rare. Until 2023 there had been only three national ones in the NHS's 75-year history. But from 2023 to 2024, that number shot up. A wave of doctors' strikes in England led to the rescheduling of half a million operations and appointments. The strikes were paused only when the government offered a 22% pay rise over two years. Now, the BMA's central demand is to restore doctors' real-terms pay to 2008 levels. By its own preferred measure, retail-price inflation, salaries are down by 21% even after last year's bump. Student debt is another grievance. But advocates insist it's not just about money. Dr Julia Patterson, who leads EveryDoctor, a campaign group, says conditions in the NHS are so grim that 'you wonder why anybody would cling on.' One of those who has, Dr Lois Nunn, describes the toll of long hours and a five-hour round-trip commute between her hospital and young family. With a shortage of specialty training posts, placements are highly competitive. Many of her doctor friends have moved to Australia; those who remain, she says, are 'quite miserable'. The malaise is not uniquely British. In Germany health workers recently went on strike over pay. Fearing increased competition, last year thousands of South Korean doctors downed stethoscopes over the government's push to recruit more medical students. Even in America, doctors are starting to unionise. 'We've lost our voice within the system,' says Dr Matt Hoffman, a doctor organising in Minnesota. Yet only in England has this frustration hardened into radicalism. In recent years self-styled 'unashamed socialists' took over most of the main committees. The logo of Broad Left, a key faction, is a stethoscope shaped like a hammer and sickle. The BMA has become a platform for activists' causes. At its recent annual conference it passed several motions on the war in Gaza, including one to suspend ties with the Israeli Medical Association. The BMA softened its critical stance on the Cass Review, an NHS-commissioned report that questioned the evidence base for youth-gender services, only after more than 1,000 members signed a letter in protest. Not all doctors support the BMA. It's a 'deeply dysfunctional mess', says one who left. Public support has fallen: 34% of Brits support strikes compared with 52% last year. If strikes go ahead, Labour's pledge to cut waiting lists will almost certainly be broken. Coroners have linked previous strikes to at least five patient deaths. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has called the strike action 'completely unjustified'. Yet even before now, the BMA's transformation has already been profound. It is no longer simply a doctors' guild, but a political force. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
Telegraph
16-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Labour won't be in government long enough to witness the mess their NHS plan is creating
Having been brought up in a Welsh coal mining village where Aneurin Bevan was regarded as deity, and where generations of my family had been staunchly-socialist coal miners, I am desperate for the NHS to succeed. I worked in the NHS for almost 45 years, 30 of those as a cancer surgeon. My generation saw the NHS at its best. However, some aspects of the recently published ten-year plan for the NHS leave me confused and astonished. How many experienced clinicians were involved in the planning? We have been told that the plan was rewritten multiple times and by several teams of writers. I am left wondering how many of those people had ever worked at the bedside or had any clinical background. The authors have paternalistically assumed that patients would prefer to have treatment locally by an untested method of care, rather than stay under specialist hospital supervision. The change is being imposed by managers who assume that they know best. Yes, we need to reduce waste and increase productivity in the NHS but some of the planned reforms are based naively on ideology and expectation rather than on pragmatism and data. Top of my list of reforms destined to fail is the 'neighbourhood health service'. This is the plan to move patient diagnosis and management from hospitals into the community by providing a six-day per week, 12 hours per day local service. The new clinics will be multi-disciplinary with thousands of new GPs working with pharmacists, social workers, paramedics, palliative care nurses, physiotherapists and other health workers. These mega-clinics will also apparently provide employment support and even coaches to advise on jobs. In other words, the ten-year plan is anticipated to reduce the 7.4 million patients waiting for hospital tests and treatment artificially, by referring most back to GPs. This sounds like a magical plan to cure multiple problems but is nothing more than the creation of yet another expensive bureaucracy to trump even the 2012 Lansley 'reforms'. We've finally found where Rachel Reeves's £29 billion is being funnelled. Why won't it work? Because the core skill required for success is a functioning and efficient general practice, a service which is visibly failing. We know from a Health Select Committee report in 2022 that almost 60 per cent of GPs work three days per week or less. Although some GPs remain committed to the cause, sadly, as a service, their persistent failure to provide timely appointments and especially continuity of care appear insurmountable and incompatible with the requirements of the ten-year plan. Furthermore. GPs are not trained for the work required of them by the ten-year plan. The NHS is intended to become GP-centric which will make great demands on their limited breadth of knowledge. Hospital consultants train for at least six years while GP training is for three years, two of which are spent in general practice. Their training programme will need to expand to include several years of hospital subspeciality experience, a reality which has been ignored. And where will the thousands of new GPs come from? British medical students who have completed placements in general practice and having seen the problems, are reluctant to consider it as a career. We know that already, 55 per cent of GP trainees are International Medical Graduates recruited from low-income countries. Is this what we want? This leads on to another certain failure of the plan where it is predicted that within ten years, only one in ten doctors will be recruited from abroad. This is an impossible task given the present starting point. In 2024, the General Medical Council registered 9,285 UK-trained doctors and 19,279 doctors who had trained abroad. To close this production gap would need at least six new medical schools which is not mentioned in the plan, and which will not happen, at least not in the timescale. Although the current situation is untenable, we are taking a risky step into the unknown, it having been assumed that there is no other solution to the problems in the NHS. In ten years' time, this government and this Health Secretary will not be around to answer for the costly errors they have created.
Telegraph
12-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
A warmer climate requires adaptation
Britain, as Aneurin Bevan once complained, is an island 'made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish'; 'only an organising genius' could somehow manage to produce a shortage of both at once. Things have moved on from Mr Bevan's day, but it remains the case that our Government is wonderfully adept at contriving to produce shortages of those things that ought to be abundant, and then attempting to manage the consequences through rationing rather than any attempt to expand supply. The latest examples of this technocratic desire to apportion what currently exists can be found in the reaction to our sweltering summer. Water supplies are low; the priority for the Government, accordingly, is to seek to use smart meters to introduce 'surge pricing ' for those households that have installed them. Houses are hot, but the heat pumps installed under government grant schemes are unable to run as air conditioning units, and in London Sadiq Khan's planning rules prioritise 'passive ventilation' over air conditioning in part owing to fears over energy use. As shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho correctly notes, this is a 'poverty mindset'; Britain's energy and water policies 'should fit what people want to do, not the other way around'. In a country that last finished building a reservoir in 1992, and where the focus of energy policy on decarbonisation appears to be threatening further deindustrialisation – Britain's industrial electricity users pay the highest prices in the world – the overwhelming effort of the Government should be on loosening the straitjacket on Britain's economic growth and consumer comforts, not attempting to tighten the straps. As the pro-growth campaign group Britain Remade has noted, too, our current trajectory is one more suited to 'a world where summer was 25C and our electricity was coal-powered'. A warmer climate requires adaptation; a cleaner grid removes an old objection to higher energy use. With heatwaves marked by spikes in excess deaths, it is surely time to change course and embrace an approach rooted in meeting the needs of the population, expanding water storage capacity, removing constraints on air conditioning, and providing the energy generation necessary to do so.
Telegraph
09-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Britain's century-long welfare experiment has reached its inevitable conclusion
More than a century ago, the Government made a deal with us all: in return for extra taxation, we would be looked after in ill-health, old age, employment and unemployment. Spearheaded by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, the founding of Britain's welfare state and invention of National Insurance over the first decades of the 20th century was nothing short of revolutionary. Aneurin Bevan's NHS followed in 1948, offering healthcare free at the point of use to all UK residents. Today, the social safety net has expanded to include parental leave, winter fuel payments, child and housing benefits and income support, among many others. At the heart of this system remains the central premise from the Government that we are rich enough as a nation that nobody should live in poverty. As Lloyd George said of the 1909 People's Budget: 'This is a war Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.' But over the generations since, the fight has become unaffordable. A century of exogenous shocks has combined with a growing and ageing population, slowing economic growth and an ever-widening belief of what we're owed from the state to threaten that noble promise. At the turn of the 20th century, our population was just shy of 40 million – next year it's set to hit 70 million. In the past 20 years, we've endured a global financial crisis, a pandemic and an energy crisis, all of which resulted in enormous amounts of government borrowing to keep the lights on. We celebrate GDP growth of 0.2pc while more than a hundred Labour backbenchers mobilise against their own government for trying to tighten up disability benefits. Against all odds, it's the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that has laid the dire situation bare. On Tuesday, the OBR published a report which declared the nation was in a 'vulnerable' economic position. Our deficit is well above the average for an advanced economy, our debt is the fourth highest among advanced European economies and our borrowing costs are the third highest of an advanced economy globally. Try as we might, nothing has tempered these risks over the past 15 years. Underlying debt has risen by 24pc of GDP in that time – since 2005 it's risen by 60pc of GDP. Every year since 2020, the OBR's debt forecasts for the UK have risen. We can assume that trend won't be broken under this Government for reasons internal and external. Borrowing costs are rising around the globe with little sign of abating, while geopolitical tensions are the most volatile they've been for years. Donald Trump's tariffs will be implemented over the coming months, upending the global trade system the West has benefited from for decades, and every nation is being forced to spend more money on defence. Within our borders, successive governments have baulked at the task at hand. As the OBR writes: 'Planned tax rises have been reversed, and, more significantly, planned spending reductions have been abandoned.' Taxes are already at their highest relative level since 1950 – there's not much room left to squeeze until our pips squeak. And that's only the situation as it stands. The state pension alone is set to cost more than 9pc of annual GDP by the time I get there, if the past decade is anything to go by, while the death of the defined benefit pension will massively reduce the number of large buyers of gilts. The cost of servicing the Government's debt will only increase as uncertainty continues to grow – a one percentage point increase in gilt yields adds roughly £30bn to the national debt. Were the Government to be forced into renationalising the water companies, decades of mismanagement would cost us a net £78bn to repurchase these debt-laden businesses. That's not to mention climate change, which the OBR predicts could lower our GDP by 8pc, while adding debt to the national balance sheet worth 56pc of GDP by the 2070s. Even if they've over-egged this five times over, that's still a GDP hit of 1.6pc with an increase to debt of more than £300bn. By anyone's calculations, we are on an unsustainable path. Let me be clear: I believe wholeheartedly in the notion of a welfare state, but in order to maintain the most important elements of the system, we need to have a difficult conversation that nobody wants. Even Rachel Reeves's attempt to tinker with minutiae like the winter fuel payments was shut down by Keir Starmer when he saw an opinion poll for an election four years hence. The core of the problem is that none of us want to admit the promises we were born into were false. We've all grown up knowing there is a state pension waiting for us when we're old, the NHS when we're ill and payments when we're in dire straits. But something has to give – and it will be deeply unpopular. Gold-plated public sector pensions obviously need reform, but this is far from bold enough. Perhaps the answer is the end of universality, with every single benefit – including pensions and the NHS – means-tested. Perhaps it's the end of one major strand of government support. Perhaps everything becomes less generous. Until we ask the question, we'll never know the answer. Whichever government sets us on the right course is signing its own death warrant – but it will be for the good of us all.
