Labour Heritage AGM  2008

The Annual General Meeting of Labour Heritage was held on Saturday 15^th March at the Friends’ Meeting House in the Euston Road. It was attended by over 50 people.

The meeting heard four speakers on two different subjects – Robert Owen and the founding of the National Health Service, both of which have anniversaries this year.

Robert Owen

This year is the 150^th anniversary of the death of Robert Owen, who died in 1858. Stephen Yeo and Stan Newens spoke about different aspects of his life and legacy.

Stephen Yeo is a history professor and currently chairs the Co-operative College Archives Committee. He described how Robert Owen left home at the age of ten and by nineteen had set himself up as a cotton manufacturer in Manchester. He acquired his wealth through marriage and later founded the New Lanark community as a model of how a mill and town should be run. (this is well worth a visit).

He travelled to Indiana where he joined New Harmony, another model community. On his return to England in 1829 he became known as the founding father of socialism. Socialism was seen in those days as the opposite not of capitalism but of individualism which was the current thinking of the time. His philosophy made him reject units like the state and above all the family which he saw as the source of selfishness.

Owen inspired activists with his ideals and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, with over one million members, was influenced by his idea of community and belonging to one big union. One of the early labour exchanges which it supported to cut out the middle man was opened in the Grays Inn Road. Many of the Rochdale pioneers who founded the Co-operative Movement in 1844 were inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen. His movement was often written off as a failure but that was not true. Defeated by superior forces maybe, but the ideals would live on. Owen regarded himself as ahead of his time.

Owen was also associated with the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. This 19^th century organisation, the first to use the term “social science” with the emphasis on social, saw itself in opposition to the “dismal science” – that of political economy!

The legacy of the ideas of Robert Owen have lived on in the Co-operative Movement, the anti-poverty movement (Owen was the first to see that poverty could be abolished), the mutual societies like building societies - before they converted to being banks and then into trouble like the Northern Rock, and also the friendly societies which ran many hospitals before the founding of the NHS.

Influence of Owen

Stan Newens also talked about the early life of Robert Owen and how he had been influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. After he founded New Lanark which employed 500 workers he had tried to convert the establishment to his new view of society. This included the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and the Czar of Russia and other European monarchs who were invited to New Larnark. He tried to persuade them to found model villages like New Lanark. The ruling echelons however did not take to his ideas but they were taken up by radicals and trades unionists at the time. William Lovett, founder of the Moral Force wing of Chartism was an Owenite.

Even before the Rochdale Pioneers, co-operative societies were set up. Owen saw co-operative societies as the means to working class empowerment rather than political reform of the state. The vote he thought, was a waste of time and the fact that the 1832 Reform Act left the working class disenfranchised, enforced this view.

Robert Owen died at the age of 87. His ideas live on in the co-operative movement and the movement for workers control. He pioneered not only utopian socialism but also secularism and internationalism. His books and pamphlets have been translated into many different languages, including Japanese and have been read all over the world.

Foundation of the National Health Service

This year will be the 60^th anniversary of the NHS – founded in 1948 by the Minister for Health in the 1945 Labour Government, Aneurin Bevan.

The first speaker on this topic was John McNichol, a visiting professor in the Social Policy Department at the LSE. John gave a picture of what the health service was like before 1945. Only people in work were covered by national health insurance and this excluded most women and children as in the 1930s only one in ten women was in paid employment. After the NHS was set up there was a surge in medical treatment for women, children and geriatric medicine. The provision of healthcare was patchy. There were the top teaching hospitals, which attracted specialist doctors. Local hospitals were funded by friendly associations. The Poor Laws still provided health care for the very poor. Doctors received fees, which could be up to £300 a day. This was in an age where the average wage was £3 per week.

Between 1946-1948 Bevan faced opposition from the medical profession on the issue of private medicine. Could it have been made illegal? Well, it has been in Canada! Would it wither away? In 1948 out of a population of 46 million, only 120,000 were covered by private insurance. The private health providers merged into one organisation – BUPA. Private hospitals remained but were seen to be inefficient – with 50% occupancy compared to 83% in an NHS hospital. That was the outcome of allowing patient choice.

In the 1960s and 1970s organisations like the Institute for Economic Affairs campaigned for choice in healthcare, but it became known that private hospitals could only cope with minor procedures. The 1970s saw the phasing out of pay-beds in NHS hospitals under a Labour Government but this policy was reversed when the Tories were elected in 1979. Due to the popularity of the NHS even rabid  privatiser – Margaret Thatcher – was heard to have said “The NHS is safe in our hands”. Privatisation however went ahead within the service of cleaning and catering for example.

1990s saw the start of the “health service reforms” and the internal market giving NHS hospitals the tight to opt out and become foundation hospitals. This process was being reversed when Labour got elected in 1997, when Frank Dobson was Minister for Health but after his departure this ceased to be the case. By this time 12% of the population had private health insurance. This figure however came to a halt after 1997.

In 2002 money was poured into the NHS by the Labour Government but with little guarantee of productivity. Under the cloak of “choice”, private companies, including those from the US began to get their hands on sections of the health service. More recent reforms such as the proposal to set up polyclinics would make sections of the NHS ripe for the acquisition by private health care providers some of whom are companies associated with the US occupation of Iraq such as Halliburton.

Nye Bevan and the British Medical Association

The second speaker, John Grigg of Labour Heritage, spoke about the battle between Nye Bevan and the British Medical Association. It was reported that the BMA were meeting when the 1945 election results were being declared and they all cheered when William Beveridge, the Liberal MP who had written a plan for the welfare state including state health provision, as part of the plan for the post-war reconstruction of Britain, lost his seat. Not all the doctors were hostile though. Dr Summerskill was elected as a Labour MP for Fulham. Her experience of treating the poor had made her a socialist!

Why did the BMA oppose Bevan’s plan for an NHS? They feared the loss of clinical freedom and they did not want to become civil servants. The profession had an elite structure with Harley Street at its pinnacle and they believed that this had a trickle down effect. Their status pre-1945 was that of self-employed small businesses. A newly qualified doctor had to buy a practice.

Nevertheless it was the case that after the 1913 National Health Insurance act introduced by Lloyd George, (which the BMA also opposed), two-thirds of their salaries came from the government. Those who were not covered by insurance had to pay a (means-tested) rate. Some doctors were prepared to give free treatment to those who could not afford it – the practice of leaving your gloves and having to return to collect them, but really for checking up on a patient who could not afford a follow up visit, was a known practice.

The plan for an NHS after 1944 attracted much support but the BMA continued its resistance up to its establishment  in July 1948. Bevan stood his ground and refused to negotiate. By May 1948 30% of GPs had signed up to the NHS and by July this had risen to 90%.

Labour Heritage held a short AGM at which the secretary gave a report of the year’s events. Three committee meetings had been held over the year attended by most of its members. There had been two events – one the Essex and one in Chiswick, West London.

Two issues of the bulletin had been produced and the membership had risen to 140. Members of the Committee are trying to get a plaque of commemoration for the house in Covent Garden, where the First International held its inaugural meeting.

The following officers were elected –

Chair –Stan Newens, Secretary- Maureen Colledge, Treasurer – John Grigg, Bulletin editor-Barbara Humphries. Additionally Alan Spence,  Bill Bolland, Kit Snape, Stephen Bird, Jason Williams and Irene Wagner were elected to the committee