Wednesday, July 1, 1998 Published at 11:05 GMT 12:05 UK
Making Britain better
For Bevan the NHS was just one step down the road to a socialist Britain
When Labour health minister Nye Bevan opened one of the world's first and most comprehensive health services to the British people on July 5, 1948, it was the realisation of a socialist dream. The new National Health Service (NHS) was the cornerstone of the post-war Labour government's commitment to build a new Jerusalem in an impoverished Britain, painfully recovering from six years of war.
Overnight, the patchwork provision of medical services, which left millions of people with little or no reliable health care, was swept away. But the establishment of the new health service was strongly opposed by the Conservative Party and by the Doctor's professional body, the British Medical Association (BMA).
The medical fuhrer
They feared both the new service and the flamboyant socialist minister whose mission it was to create it. Once Bevan had published his Bill on the health service in 1946, one former chairman of the BMA described Bevan's proposals in the following terms:
The BMA was concerned that by nationalising both the charity hospitals and the former poor law hospitals run by local authorities, Bevan would strike down doctors' cherished professional independence, and their right to buy or sell general practices.
They feared their new role, with a salaried income, would reduce them to the status of mere civil servants.
But if Bevan was to establish his health service, he needed the co-operation of the doctors. After all, the NHS could not operate without doctors.
Bevan arranged to meet the leaders of the BMA in an exclusive London restaurant. Dr Roland Cockshot was one of those present.
"We screwed our nerves up_we might have been going to meet Adolf Hitler." But after noticing the Welsh class warriors well-tailored suit, Dr Cockshot was forced to revise his opinion of the charismatic minister for health, although he admitted afterwards: "We were quite surprised to discover he talked English."
Charmed as they may have been by Bevan's personality, the doctors remained flatly opposed to his health service.
Once the Health Bill became an act in the closing months of 1946, the BMA immediately adopted a policy of non co-operation with the health service and refused to negotiate with the minister on their conditions of service.
But Bevan was determined to prevent a sectional interest derail an act of Parliament. He described the BMA as a, "small body of politically poisoned people" who had decided "to fight the Health Act itself and to stir up as much emotion as they can in the profession."
But as Bevan's stormy relationship with the BMA carried on into 1948, the minister luckily managed to strike up a working relationship with the Royal College of Physicians headed by Churchill's personal doctor Lord Moran.
'Stuffing their mouths with gold'
By allowing the consultants to work inside the health service and at the same time still treat their lucrative private patients, Bevan bought the backing of the consultants by, as he put it, "stuffing their mouths with gold."
But Bevan had managed to take from them the right to buy and sell practices.
By NHS D-Day, July 5, 1948, 90% of doctors had signed up for the new service. But although Bevan had in the end comfortably won the battle, he could not resist one last attack on those who had stood in the way of his dream.
In a speech on the eve of the heath service's launch, Bevan called the Tories "lower than vermin". When the prime minister, Clement Attlee, suggested the opening of the NHS should be celebrated as a national institution supported by the whole nation, it was too much for Bevan, who replied:
"The Conservatives voted against the National Health Act, not only on the second but on the Third Reading. I do not see why we should forget this."