Health and Social Care Bill

Gerald Kaufman Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

If there are three letters in the English language that resonate in practically every household in this country, they are NHS. One need say no more than “Save the NHS” for the people of this country to know what one is about. The NHS is this country’s most precious national institutional asset. It is free at the point of use and available to all. It has saved lives, it has prolonged lives, it has improved the quality of lives, and it has done all those things by the million—and now this Government are in the process of destroying it.

That is not surprising, I suppose, because, after all, when Aneurin Bevan brought to this House the Bill to create the national health service, the Conservatives voted against the creation of the national health service. Ted Heath accepted it as part of the national consensus. That consensus was breached by Margaret Thatcher, but even she never targeted the national health service. “The national health service is safe in my hands”, she said. It is all the more shameful that the Government are legislating in this way, because the Tory posters in the 2010 election featuring the current Prime Minister specifically featured the NHS—the Tories knew that that was their vulnerable point. It is now even more so, and it will destroy them.

This Government are the most right-wing Government that the country has had for three quarters of a century. They bring back the social neglect and the social damage of the era of Neville Chamberlain. They are creating mass unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment. They are harming our schools and destroying Sure Start, whose creation, of course, they also opposed. They are taking the police off the streets and provoking crime on the streets. They are inflicting irreparable harm on the universities and on higher education. They are harming pensioners, even down to the niggling theft from them of money from the winter fuel payment. They are creating homelessness. They are doing damage that it will take a generation to repair, even if they are thrown out at the next general election—and all without a mandate of any kind.

All this damage to my constituency and to every constituency in the country, including those of Government Members, is being done with the cynical complicity of the Liberal Democrats. Without them, none of this would be possible. Last night, I had the distasteful experience of refreshing my memory of their manifesto by reading it again, and there is nothing in it to justify what they are participating in today and will be as this Bill proceeds through the House of Commons.

The Liberal Democrats’ spring conference last weekend was a degrading spectacle. They even trundled on the nation’s favourite elder sister, Shirley Williams, to try to convince people that this appalling Bill and their complicity in it are tolerable. What a contrast that is with their facile promises in opposition, when they promised everything because they knew that they would not have to deliver. Now they have to deliver and they are damaging everything they touch. They could save the national health service by their votes this evening. If they do not, the nation will remember and the nation will never forgive.