The National Health Service is the jewel in the crown of great Liberal ideas. In the midst of your Spring conference, I urge you to be reawakened by the spirit of Beveridge and return our NHS from the precipice to which your partners in government are pushing it.
‘We should regard want, idleness, ignorance, squalor and disease as enemies of us all …..That is the meaning a social conscience, that we refuse to make a separate peace with evil.’ Quite so. Beveridge’s vision of a welfare state should still say it all for the party you lead. The proposals in the Health and Social Care Bill will lead to the break up of the greatest statement of Liberal aspiration for fairness and free health care for all, based on need, not on ability to pay. The current proposals lay open our most cherished public service to the perversity of European Competition Law – a licence for private companies to challenge state provision, dip in, and duck out of services depending on how much they might make from them. The public purse will be emptied by privatised health commissioners, buying services from privatised health service providers. Those who cannot afford to take themselves out of reliance on our vestigial health services will be left to suffer and die as are one fifth of the Americans now. We will need a new Beveridge to remind us of what we have lost and what we must recreate.
‘“Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.’ The combined ranks of health workers, trade unions, Royal Colleges, patient interests groups and large numbers of your party cannot all be accused of ignorance about the true intentions of the Health and Social Care Bill. The evil weed is being cultivated by your partners in government- you can grow it with them, or chop it down.
‘The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of common man.’ Please do not sacrifice the principles of why you wish to govern for the attractions of office- power for its own sake, instead of power for good. You have it in your power to call for the withdrawal of this poisonous bill.
Do not let the darker words of Beveridge come to haunt your office. ‘The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership until they have lost the desire to lead anyone.’
John Middleton Public Health Physician
A Better NHS 
hear hear!
Reblogged this on Carlo Favaretti.
The debate, or rather the lack of debate based on fact, underlies Parliament’s likeness to the “Curate’s egg”.
“Very good in parts, Milord”.
Sadly in this case the bad bits overwhelm the good bits, and the definition of “good” and “bad” appears to depend on which side of the egg one is sitting.
The Lib/Dems appear to have lost their sense of smell and should wake up to the fact that the fetor of this suppurating gram negative life threatening infection being introduced into the NHS does not smell like a bed of roses no matter how much deodorant is sprayed on it.
For God’s sake Mr Clegg get a grip on what is left of your humanitarian conscience and your ability to argue using the basis of fact rather than the hyperbole of Tory propaganda!
Any chance of him actually reading and responding to this letter? Has it been sent to the Gateshead conference?
it has been sent to the deputy prime minister but please tweet anyone you know at the conference and anywhere else for that matter ta Dr j