How NHS Wales could lead the world

People
ViewsApril 4th, 2012

Wales, and the world, is now well into a time of profound change – bigger than anything we have experienced since the industrial revolution turned everything upside down 200 years ago.  In the country where industrial co

mmodity production began, we are approaching its end.  A generation of men whose fathers and grandfathers had learned to live in dignity as skilled manual workers, doing the hard tasks on which profits then depended, is no longer required.

Big changes in society beget big new ideas; but where are they?

New ideas come from new people, people whose own personal experience has led them to conclusions completely outside the scope of respectable discourse.  Such ideas may grow very big indeed without reaching the notice of those reasonable people who own our newspapers, control our broadcasting, appoint our university vice-chancellors, or somehow reach

the top of our main political parties.  But as George Bernard Shaw once remarked, progress never depends on reasonable people.  Reasonable people adapt to the world as, to them and to every other right-minded person, it seems always to be.  Unreasonable people, on the other hand, waste their lives trying to change the world  to something better.  This usually has disastrous consequences, certainly for these unreasonable people, but often enough for everyone else.  Nevertheless, all progress therefore depends on unreasonable people, who prefer the evidence of their own experience to orthodox revelation, however widely revered.

A New Path Entirely tries to explain how experience of work in the UK National Health Service could produce new people with new ideas, exactly suited to the new needs of a new Welsh society, based on production of knowledge and intellectual skills, rather than production of material commodities.  It really needs a second instalment, looking at the economic potential of this idea, but perhaps that may come later, if A New Path can at least bring the theme of the NHS as a socialising force onto the agenda for serious discussion in Wales – which the three books I have written on this subject have so far failed to do; perhaps the times were not yet ripe, the crisis and its solutions were insufficiently obvious .

Events are moving fast.  One passage in A New Path already requires revision.  Shadow Minister Andy Burnham has now been allowed to promise repeal of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government’s Health and Social Care Act, if an when a Labour government gets itself re-elected to UK government.  When I was writing, Ed Milliband’s shadow cabinet was still dithering on this subject.  This is not important.  Our future depends not on which way these people dither, but how quickly a new generation of workers by hand and by brain recognises that they alone must accept responsibility to develop practical socialist ideas inside the carcass of their own society.  My guess is that this will happen faster than most now suppose.

A New Path Entirely is available to download from bevanfoundation.org

Julian Tudor Hart Biography

JulianTudor Hart was a general practitioner for 35 years, first in London, then in Glyncorrwg, a South Wales coal-mining village.  Between these two posts he was apprenticed in epidemiology to Richard Doll and Archie Cochrane. He pioneered community control of hypertension and other chronic conditions, with apparently substantial effects on premature deaths compared with a control population.  He returned to full time scientific staff of the Medical Research Council in 1987, retired in 1992, and since then has continued lecturing and writing.  The substantially revised second edition of his most recent book The Political Economy of Health Care was published in 2010 by Policy Press.  He has published eight other books and over 160 papers in scientific journals, has been visiting professor or lecturer at many UK and foreign universities, is an honorary Fellow of Universities of Swansea, Cardiff, Glamorgan and Glasgow, an honorary DSc at universities of Glasgow and London, and was the first winner of the Royal College of General Practitioners international Discovery Prize for research in primary care in 2006. He joined the Communist Party in 1946, left it in 1978, and has been an active member of the Lab our Party since 1980. If you want any more, look at his illustrated website www.juliantudorhart.org.

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