It’s unique. It’s bitterly criticised. But it’s the envy of the world and makes Britain great. I am reminded of it every time I experience one of India’s expensive, overcrowded, insanitary, money-grabbing private hospitals and nursing homes. I refer to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) which completed 70 years on Thursday.
Everyone knows that the NHS was in danger of collapsing when thousands of migrant Indian doctors saved it, albeit because they were looking for jobs. Dr Taj Hassan is the distinguished president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. What is less well-known is the Indian connection of the founder of the NHS. I don’t mean Clement Attlee’s political colleague, Nye Bevan, a Welsh miner’s son who rightly said the “eyes of the world” were on Britain when the service was launched in 1948. I mean Sir William Beveridge whose report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, written during the darkest days of World War II, anticipated a brighter dawn for mankind.
Beveridge was born in Rangpur in what is now Bangladesh in 1879. His father Henry Beveridge of the Indian Civil Service was district magistrate there. His mother was the famous — or notorious — Annette Akroyd who came to India to promote women’s education, started a girls school in Calcutta (no, Kolkata then), fell out with the apparently less progressive Keshub Chunder Sen, married the progressive Beveridge, and became a strong critic of the judicial reform that the Ilbert Bill contemplated. I have often wondered about how her social thinking was reconciled to her husband’s. Even though an ICS officer, he wrote letters to The Englishman criticising British racism. One letter objected to Indians not being allowed near the bandstand in Calcutta’s Eden Gardens.
As a result of such defiance, Beveridge failed to secure his heart’s desire of sitting on the High Court bench. My great-grandfather, Behari Lal Gupta, who started his ICS career as an apprentice under Beveridge, was also a failure in that sense for he was never confirmed as a High Court judge, as the late Kamal Basu, the former mayor of Calcutta, gleefully yelled out at a public meeting where I was speaking. I couldn’t tell Basu there and then that my ancestor’s failure was also his triumph. He was punished for submitting a note that resulted in the Ilbert Bill.
I was talking of the younger Beveridge and his prescription for the mammoth pre-cradle to post-grave health care system that, despite criticism, is conceptually noble, and more popular today than any other institution like the royal family or the armed forces. The Beveridge report that inspired it focussed on freeing the public from what the author called the five great evils of society — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. I wish some wise Indian would recognise that these universal evils matter more to the human condition than scoring points over Rahul Gandhi and the Congress or impressing Westerners by trotting out glib boasts about India’s supposed technological advance.
My own experience of the NHS has been slight. But I do remember the first occasion in 1955 or 1956. I had a sudden attack of nose-bleeding, and the elderly English doctor I visited laboriously wrote down all my personal particulars while I sat with bloodied handkerchief pressed to my nose. No wonder Prince Andrew once said tongue-in-cheek in Calcutta that the British left us a bureaucracy that we had “improved”. “Now we’ve made an honest man of you!” he declared jovially at the end, turning to my nose. I was told afterwards he was making sure I was registered as his patient so that he could draw the official fees on my account.
There’s money to be made from the NHS which costs three times more than defence and double the cost of education. It can pay for all manner of fancy treatments and services. It can — or could — be exploited by visiting foreigners. The joke was that Americans found it cheaper to fly across the Atlantic to see an NHS dentist. The huge expansion of services to include home carers, subsidised taxis and air ambulances means additional scope for abuse.
All the same, as Beveridge wrote, “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.”
To a country ravaged by war — a “bankrupt nation”, in Winston Churchill’s words — it was a bold and distant vision of a better future.I can only be envious for poorly-served India.
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