This being International Workers’ Day, it’s the right time to remember those who inspired the NHS.
The coal miners of Tredegar in South Wales set up a Workmen’s Medical Aid and Sick Relief Fund in 1890 to bring health services to their families.
Nobody told them to do it, nobody paid them to do it. It was a natural act of collective insurance against accidents in the pit and illness at home.
Their pioneering efforts spurred Nye Bevan to give us the health service that is saving us from coronavirus calamity today.
And their example was taken up by others long before we got the NHS. Miners at the Ifton colliery in St Martins, Shropshire, paid sixpence a week from their wages to set up a £15,000 community hospital in Chirk in 1921.
The pit closed more than 50 years ago, but a statue in the village commemorating the miners is today surrounded in rainbows of thanks to the NHS.
The picture above neatly brings together the collective spirit of workers and their unions and the public service ethic of the health service.
It is emphatically not the mindset of the Tories, who proclaim: “We are the party of the NHS.”
Dominic Raab repeated this mendacious mantra in the Commons – with a straight face but a twisted tongue.
They opposed it when the post-war Labour government set it up, and they’ve undermined it ever since by creeping privatisation, spending cuts, reductions in real wages and outsourcing of jobs.
The Prime Minister praises the “fantastic” health teams who saved his life, and safely brought his new baby son into the world.
But he would have voted against establishing the NHS, and he left it woefully unprepared, underfunded and demoralised in the face of the biggest health crisis for a century.
Big-talking Boris lacks the vision and social conscience of the Tredegar pioneers, because he could never have been one of them. He’s never got his hands dirty in his life.
With work, anyway.
