Jeremy Hunt is so bad at his job that he’s now resorted to rewriting the history of the NHS

How dare Jeremy Hunt claim that the Tories 'set up' the NHS – they voted against its creation

Jeremy Hunt gave a speech at the Tory Party conference which raised a few eyebrows (AFP/Getty)

On 30 April 1946, the then Minister for Health and Housing, Nye Bevan, sat down to a rapturous reception from Labour MPs after a rousing speech in favour of the National Health Service Bill. Bevan had opened the debate on the Bill’s second reading in the House of Commons with one of his finest performances, displaying a strong grasp of detail and setting out a clear vision.

He spoke for over an hour, dealing comprehensively with questions from MPs, before reaching an inspiring peroration: “I believe it will lift the shadow from millions of homes. It will keep very many people alive who might otherwise be dead. It will relieve suffering. It will produce higher standards for the medical profession. It will be a great contribution towards the wellbeing of the common people of Great Britain.”

Richard Law responded for the Conservative opposition in strident, partisan style, striking directly at Bevan himself: “The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Health has received an ovation from the Benches behind him for a speech as eloquent, as unconvincing, and as disingenuous as any I have ever heard from him.” A few days later, when the debate concluded on 2 May, Tories voted against the Bill, which passed by 359 votes to 172.

In these circumstances, it took a special degree of audacity for the current Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, to try to steal the credit for creating the National Health Service for the Conservative Party at its annual conference.

Citing the NHS’s forthcoming 70^th birthday in 2018, a video played behind Hunt on the platform before he declared: “Nye Bevan deserves credit for founding the NHS in 1948. But that [the person in the video] wasn’t him or indeed any other Labour minister. That was the Conservative Health Minister in 1944, Sir Henry Willink, whose white paper announced the setting up of the NHS. He did it with cross-party support.”

Sir William Beveridge’s scheme of post-war reconstruction had included an assumption that there would be a “national health service for prevention and comprehensive treatment” available to all; this was the idea around which Willink constructed his White Paper. However, the form of Bevan’s National Health Service, introduced four years later, was very different.

Willink would have left voluntary and local-authority hospitals with existing owners; Bevan nationalised the hospitals. To deny this, and to downplay what Bevan achieved between 1945 and 1948 is no more than a naked political attempt by the modern-day Conservative Party to rewrite history to try to hide their error of opposing the creation of the NHS in Parliament.

It was Bevan who piloted the National Health Service Bill through the House of Commons with opposition from the Tories at every turn. In the Cabinet, Herbert Morrison, who, as Leader of the London County Council, had run a successful city-wide health system, had challenged Bevan on his hospital ownership proposals.

In spite of this, Bevan persuaded his government colleagues to nationalise the hospitals to ensure central government responsibility for healthcare and to institutionalise a universal standard of care across the land. It was Bevan, with his drive, determination and tenacity, who spent the best part of 18 months up until the service came into operation, on 5 July 1948, in painstaking negotiations with the medical profession to ensure that doctors participated in the new service to make it work.

Bevan’s achievement changed the national debate on social security. He made healthcare a right that British people could come to expect, based on need, not wealth, and not a commodity only available to a privileged few.

Considering, in contrast, the Tory-Liberal Democrat Coalition’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act, with its section on “competition” in healthcare, and the fragmentation of the modern-day NHS that it has caused in England, no wonder Jeremy Hunt wants to re-write the great Nye Bevan’s part in our history.

Nick Thomas-Symonds is the MP for Torfaen, has written biographies of Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan, and is the Chair of the Aneurin Bevan Society