To Germany, by Charles Sorley

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

To Germany, by Charles Sorley. Killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged 20

Lieutenant Arkwright of the 9th Hussars, washing in the grounds of a chateau, September 5th 1914. During last few days, the British Army had retreated several hundred miles, from Mons in Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. Across 1914, the all-volunteer, pre-war professional British Expeditionary Force suffered 90,000 casualties, which was greater than the number of soldiers originally sent.

Men of the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, some time before 7am on July 1st 1916, preparing to attack Beaumont Hamel. The Battle of the Somme was when Britain's volunteer armies were first used in large numbers, and 18,000 soldiers were killed on that first day.

Soldiers and civilians in Birmingham, celebrating the announcement of the Armistice, November 11th 1918.

'A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness:' Why Jeremy Corbyn Isn't the John the Baptist of Foreign Affairs

Saturday saw 700,000 people march in central London in a (vain, in my opinion) attempt to stop Brexit. This issue is the single greatest facing the UK. At best, it has the capacity to produce economic and social turmoil. At worst, it is almost beyond our ability to comprehend how bad it will be.

Was the Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition there to throw his weight behind the campaign to save us from ourselves? He was not. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn was in Geneva, marking 20 years since the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, on charges of human rights abuses.

This year, I read the excellent Pinochet in Piccadilly, which examined the historic ties between Britain and Chile. From 19th century economic imperialism, to the student Jack Straw visiting the Allende government, the coup that had Allende killed, Pinochet's outriders of Thatcherism using Chile as their economic test lab, and finally Pinochet's fate being argued out in the House of Lords, the ties between Britain and Chile run deep, especially where Pinochet is concerned.

This book was written in the year 2000, two years after Pinochet's arrest in London. It was still fresh from the events. And yet Jeremy Corbyn doesn't make a single appearance. Many of the participants were interviewed, including the Chilean exiles who staged a vigil outside the House of Lords while Pinochet's fate was debated. Not a single sign of the MP for Islington North. That is not to say that Corbyn was not involved in the anti-Pinochet struggle. It was a popular left wing position after the coup, and until Pinochet was dragged from power. It is widely regarded as the issue that ignited Corbyn's passion for foreign affairs. But his position and role were so unremarkable that a book about the subject, written at the time, failed to mention him.

Corbyn campaigning against Pinochet

This Corbyn trend is not unique to Britain and Chile. Since being unexpectedly catapulted from utter obscurity to the leadership of the UK's largest leftist political force in 2015, there has been a big push on Corbyn's image. His years of engagement in various foreign affairs issues of the later 20th century have been held up as a virtue, which they undoubtedly are. However, as many of these events recede beyond memory for most people, there is a danger that the myth of Jeremy Corbyn will distort his part in these events.

Nowhere is this clearer than with regards to the Northern Irish Troubles. Corbyn and John McDonnell were long time supporters of a United Ireland and Sinn Fein, and by extension at that time the IRA. Whenever this is now raised, the response is to say that it was because they were exploring every possible avenue to bring about peace and stop the appalling sectarian carnage that engulfed Northern Ireland in the later 20th century.

Which again would be grand if anyone could point to a single moment where their actions had some influence. Corbyn voted against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first (and as it turned out, faltering) step on the road to peace. Neither of them played any role in the Good Friday Agreement, or the torturous process afterwards by which the IRA was persuaded to disarm, nor the unionist parties persuaded to share power with those who had until recently been murderers. John McDonnell's claims he was trying to persuade the IRA to disarm in 2000 especially fly in the face of this timeline. Any history book on the Troubles doesn't contain their names at all.

Signing of the Good Friday Agreement, April 1998. Definitely no Corbyn or McDonnell there...

The same goes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The summer was dominated by stories about Corbyn's links to the various Palestinian groups fighting the Israeli government. And yes, Corbyn is a long term supporter of the Palestinian cause. In this, he was ahead of the curve, as Israel has traditionally had a lot of support from within the UK Labour party. Only with the savage war in Lebanon during the 1980s, and as occupation began to take its toll, did this start to shift within the Western left. But his claims to have been at the PLO cemetery in Tunisia to promote peace are laughable. When the final analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is written, his contribution won't even merit a footnote within a footnote.

Signing of the Oslo Accords, 1993. I doubt there's a single Briton there, let alone backbench Labour MPs...

Surely Corbyn's one area of foreign policy success must be South Africa. After all, there is this photo, which did the rounds last year:

I'm not going to repeat much of the analysis of this, which can be seen here. But Corbyn was not a lone voice in the 1980s in opposing apartheid. Since Harold Macmillan had told the apartheid parliament in 1960 that the 'winds of change' were blowing through Africa, opposition to the racial state had been formal British policy, backed up by widespread global support. The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, was based in London from 1978 until 1994; the South African government had to resort to sending spies to plant bombs in the offices to try and get at them, as they had no help from the British government in moving against what was labelled a terrorist organisation. The rally that this picture was taken at was organised by a Trotskyite fringe group, and was not supported by the main British anti-apartheid groups. Two other Labour MPs were arrested. Aligned with the right side of history? Corbyn certainly was. A lone voice standing up bravely against apartheid? Not really.

Perhaps where Corbyn can legitimately claim to have been a trailblazer is the war in Iraq. As the world watched with baited breath, tens of millions around the globe used 15th February 2003 to march against the war. Corbyn did give a speech at the million strong march in London, under the banner of the Stop the War Coalition. You can see it here.

The poor quality of the few pictures of Corbyn at the rally probably tells you more than any words I can spill on the subject

If you look at the BBC news report from the day, they list a huge litany of speakers. Charles Kennedy, as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the largest UK-wide political party to come out against the war. Jesse Jackson, Tariq Ali, Mo Mowlam, Ken Livingstone, Vanessa Redgrave, Bianca Jagger, Tony Benn, Harold Pinter- all are noted for their contribution. Corbyn is not.

This is the politician that did most to articulate the anti-war case in 2003.

Blair refused to bow to public pressure. But he still had to face the House of Commons, in a moment of high political drama. Labour was deeply divided on the issue. Junior ministers resigned, and Robin Cook delivered one of the finest speeches in modern Parliamentary history in resigning from the Cabinet to vote against the war. No one could be quite sure how events would play out.

Cook's resignation speech- Look who picked a good spot behind him!

When MPs voted, Blair had his majority. 412 MPs voted to support the war in Iraq, as against 149 against, and 94 abstentions. But this belied the Labour splits. Only 254 Labour MPs had voted with their own Prime Minister; 84 of them voted no outright, and a further 69 abstained. Blair had been saved by the Conservatives, UUP and DUP. Yes, Corbyn had done the right thing. But he was not a leading light, nor was he alone in voting against the war. In that, he was joined by 83 other Labour MPs, 52 Liberal Democrats, 9 Scottish and Welsh nationalists, two Conservatives, 1 SDLP and 1 independent MP.

While on many of these issues, Corbyn was indeed on the right side of history, he was not alone, nor a driver of events. Most importantly, when the history books are written, he will at best be a footnote in these events. The role his supporters wish to ascribe him, as the John the Baptist of foreign affairs, the long voice crying out in the wilderness, heralding better things to come, is simply not true.

"I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all. ... And that is his character": Why we are still living in 1991, Part II.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece showing how the world of 1991 was still very much with us today. And if you ignore the bit where I confidently predicted a second Clinton would sit in the Oval Office, the comparisons between 1991 and the late 2010s hold up reasonably well.

This week, the US political scene has witnessed the spectacle of a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court being accused of sexual misconduct, the brave testimony of his accuser, and a combative response of the potential justice.. The parallels to 1991 apparently aren't done yet. 

In the summer of that year, the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring. In his place, George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American, who had been an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as a federal judge. Yet Thomas provoked panic and fear amongst those on the left. He was a strident conservative, and many liberals promised they would fight his nomination in the last ditch. The battle lines were drawn for his confirmation hearings.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were not to be treated lightly. It was only four years since the same committee, headed by the same senator, a Joe Biden of Delaware, had sunk the nomination of Robert Bork. Bork had been chosen by Reagan for his impeccable conservative credentials. Yet during his hearings Bork floundered, as his conservative views came under attack for being too extreme, as did his role in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Bork had been the highest ranking Justice Department official to survive Richard Nixon's cull, the one who had fired the Watergate special prosecutor for Nixon. Bork was rejected by the committee, and later voted down by the full senate.

Despite the concerns over Thomas' views, and the power of the hearings, during the autumn of 1991 his nomination wound its way through the hearings. Towards the end of the process, a bomb was detonated under this orderly process. The media leaked that the FBI background checks on Thomas had thrown up reports that Thomas had made unwanted, sexually inappropriate remarks to a colleague, Anita Hill. Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called before the committee to give evidence. What evidence she gave. The US public were treated to comments about the size of Thomas' penis, comments about pubic hair, about how long Thomas could last in bed, about Thomas' favourite porn stars.

But Thomas wasn't going down without a fight. In his own testimony, he denied everything, and claimed he was the subject of a "lynching." As a black man, the language was emotional, and designed to hit home.

It did the trick, but barely. The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas' name to the full Senate without a recommendation to accept or reject, a very rare move. Thomas was confirmed by the full Senate with 52 votes to 48, and not along party lines either. Some Democrats supported Thomas, while some Republicans tried to stop him taking office. But take office he did.

It is easy to see the parallels between the two events. In both 1991 and 2018, an extremely conservative choice to sit on the US Supreme Court fired up opposition to his confirmation. Liberal activists and interest groups draw a line in the sand. As the hearings come to a close, allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. They culminate in a dramatic showdown before the Senate, with accuser and defender both fighting for their lives and pouring out their souls.

However, there are two major differences between the hearings of 1991, and the hearings of 2018. Firstly, in 1991, Hill was questioned by the full committee. The optics, and the message they sent, were awful. An all male, all white, mainly elderly, committee, fired questions at the young black woman in front of them, some of them questions of an extremely explicit nature. The outrage at how Hill was treated bled into the 1992 general election. Bush was not re-elected, and a record number of women were swept into office. The Republican party have clearly taken this message on board. The mixed gender, mixed racial Democratic team on the 2018 Judiciary Committee posed their own questions to Brett Kavanaugh's accuser. The all male, all white Republicans of 2018 picked a female prosecutor to field their questions. They do not want to pour oil on the flames of an already difficult election year.

Secondly, in 1991, Anita Hill's lone voice was not enough to stop Clarence Thomas making it onto the Supreme Court. Thomas narrowly survived the process, and remains on the Court to this day, as the longest serving current justice. One reason the Bush White House stuck with Thomas was that opinion polls showed the vast majority of people believed his denials over Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment. In 2018, although the process has not yet reached its endgame, Kavanaugh's chances of ending up a Justice of the Supreme Court look less good than Thomas' did at this stage. Because millions of people believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

I believe her. And you should too. We owe it to the people of 2018 to show that we are not really still living in 1991.

(To help me write this, I drew on this excellent article from the New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/anita-hill-kavanaugh-hearings.html

What struck me was how some of the senators who questioned Hill in 1991 are *still* in the same roles, and have apparently learnt nothing...)

"Financial Armageddon"

What would financial Armageddon look like?

It probably says a lot that I can clearly remember this article, a full decade on, down to being able to remember the title, and some of the lines. It really did look like Armageddon at the time. In the autumn of 2008, the Western capitalist model of the world was staring into the abyss, and no one could be quite sure we wouldn't go crashing down into it.

I couldn't explain what caused it. I'm not sure, even now, anyone could explain for certain the causes, without either being very biased, or so technical no one understood them. But, with a handful of exceptions, most people did not know what was coming. Until the end of 2008, there had been gathering storm clouds, but most of it was hidden from full view. In late 2007, there'd been a run on Northern Rock, and the government had been forced to nationalise it. In the United States, there were serious concerns over the state of the mortgage market. But for most people, these were concerns in a far away land, that of economics, that none of them really understood.

Until on September 15th, 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't a bank in the sense most people understood. They had no branches, no current accounts of individuals. Instead, they dealt with the money of companies, taking it and investing it in other things, to look for a return. During the 1990s and 2000s, many banks had done this more and more. The lines between 'high street' banks and 'investment' banks was increasingly blurred. More worryingly, no one really knew where all this money, and associated debt, actually was. When Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most venerable names in world finance, applied for bankruptcy protection, this sent shockwaves around the system. Someone had owned up to how bad this situation was. The image of bankers, the new frontier of the 21st century economy, emptying their offices in cardboard boxes, showed how the mighty had fallen.

What made it worse was the Bush administration. Saddled as we are now with Trump, it is hard to think back on how awful Bush was. In the dying days of his presidency, Bush had found himself having to hand out money to mortgage lenders and banks. In September 2008, he decided enough was enough. His administration wouldn't get Lehman Brothers out of the hole they had fallen in to. They would be allowed to collapse.

Big mistake. This turned alarm into a full blown panic. Around the world, banks stopped lending money, as they were afraid of getting themselves into more and more debt. People and companies who had put their money into these labyrinthine schemes began to withdraw it, afraid it would all be lost. With the money supply freezing up, ordinary businesses found themselves out of money too.

In an intertwined global financial economy, the contagion and chaos in the USA spread around the world like wildfire. In the UK, the banks of the City of London found themselves buffeted by the same storms. But the UK's banks were slightly different. The same banks dabbling in international investment schemes were those that people held their money in. If they went down, all hell would break loose. Alistair Darling, the then Chancellor, has since said he was afraid of a breakdown of law and order if the most exposed bank, RBS (containing Natwest and Ulster Bank), closed.

The Bush administration realised it had made a grave error. In the parlance of the time, they had tried to show that no one was 'too big to fail.' And they'd turned a problem into a crisis. As September faded into October, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, devised a plan to put up $700 billion, to 'hoover up' the debt that no one really knew who owned it. The US House of Representatives voted the plan down, wiping billions off of the world stock markets. Days later, they accepted a modified version of Paulson's plan. But the world money markets failed to respond. The money supply was still jammed.

Enter the unlikely hero of the hour. 

Since then, Gordon Brown has got a lot of bad press. He was not a telegenic politician, and inspired loathing and contempt in many. But he had the best economic brain in the land, and this was his hour. Between Brown and Darling, they unveiled a plan which did two things. Like in the USA, it would take the worthless debt out of the banks' hands. But it would also see the UK government take shares in banks in danger of collapse. In effect, those banks would be backed by the full weight of the UK economy. This worked. The pressure on them eased. In the USA, Paulson used his new powers to copy Brown's plan. As 2008 turned into 2009, the immediate crisis passed. In late 2008, Gordon Brown slipped up at Prime Minister's Questions. He meant to say the government had saved the banks; he accidentally said saved the world. The Tories opposite mocked him mercilessly. But he was right.

All of us have lived with the consequences since. In the short term, the lack of money available for companies and businesses led to a deep, painful recession, the worst in living memory. The £500 billion that Brown and Darling poured into the UK financial markets left the government in massive debt. When Labour went down to electoral defeat in 2010, the new Coalition government made it a priority to pay those debts back, which it did by sharply cutting spending on other government services. In the UK, this double whammy of deep recession and government cutbacks has led to what many have termed a 'lost decade.' My generation, those of us who came into the workforce during this lost decade, will live with the impact of the autumn of 2008 forever, as it forecast we will never catch up with our parents, or those below us, in terms of lost earnings.

But it is the psychological impact that has lingered most. At the time, there was outrage that the greed of investment bankers had taken us to edge of the precipice, peered over, and nearly taken the entire Western world with them. 'Banker bashing' became an accepted part of life, and it became toxic to say that you worked in the City of London, or on Wall Street. But those responsible were not held to account, save in some minor and token ways. The decade of low growth and austerity that followed wouldn't have been solved by jailing some City of London executives. But the notion did take hold that those at the top had wreaked havoc, and had been allowed to get away with it. It was believed that the notion, of those in far away places living it up at the expense of those struggling to get by, would benefit political parties of the left. Instead, it is the populist right that has seized the narrative and run with it. It is just possible, in the images of tumbling market and bankers losing their jobs, to see the shadows of Donald Trump, Brexit, and any number of backlash screams, coming to being in the background.

What I can clearly remember was how it felt. I was 18, in the last few weeks before I headed off to university, and the entire world seemed to be falling in. I followed the story avidly. It was my first introduction to economics, American politics, and the first clear difference in UK politics I was aware of. It was also the first truly global historic event that I had ever lived through. It shaped my outlook on how the world should, and could, be run. I will always remain a child of 2008.

Prague in the Spring Time

For many Czechoslovaks, it was the noise that alerted them. As day broke on August 21st 1968, they were woken by loud, rumbling noises in the streets. At first, many assumed they were hearing a large vehicle go past. But then it continued. Those brave enough to peer outside soon found out the truth. The country's worst nightmare had come true. The Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia.

The 1960s was the height of the Cold War. That meant that the countries in Eastern Europe languished under Soviet domination, and had done since they were overrun by the Red Army in the dying days of the Second World War. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements, signed between the victorious Allies, had committed the USSR to holding free and fair elections in the countries it had invaded. But no country led by Joseph Stalin was going to allow that. The regimes in these countries imposed one-party communist rule, and were to all intents and purposes Soviet puppet regimes. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, with the full apparatus of secret police and stifling authoritarianism imported directly from the Soviet Union.

Only two countries had dared to break the mould. In the late 1940s, the leader of Yugoslavia, Tito, made it clear that he was willing to accept American money to rebuild his country. This lead to Yugoslavia leaving the Soviet sphere of influence, and forging its own middle way between the East and the West. In reality, the communist world probably wasn't big enough for the dominant personalities of Tito and Stalin. In Hungary in 1956, a new leader, Nagy, attempted to dismantle the communist system, and take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. This brief flowering of freedom had been swiftly crushed by Soviet forces, and Nagy was brought to Moscow as a prisoner and executed. Since then, political and cultural freedom behind the Iron Curtain was vastly curtailed.

But then along came Czechoslovakia in 1968. In January of that year, Alexander Dubcek became leader of the country, and introduced a package of mild reforms. The idea was to allow a measure of democratisation, free speech, and cultural expression, whilst simultaneously allowing the Czechoslovak communist party to hold on to power. Dubcek called these reforms 'socialism with a human face.' The cultural output, and the noisy free press, that emerged from under the shadow of repression was known as the Prague Spring.

The leadership of the USSR was not amused. Despite Dubcek's assurances of his commitment to communism and the Warsaw Pact, they saw this as the first chink in the armour of the Eastern Bloc. Having failed to dissuade Dubcek, at midnight on 21st August 1968 armies from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed the Dubcek government. Despite Dubcek's call for no resistance, there were widespread protests against the Soviet invasion, and thousands confronted the Soviet forces on the streets. This so spooked the Soviets that they refrained from formally removing Dubcek until the following year. Protests continued, and in January 1969 Czech student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Thousands attended his funeral.

Yet the damage was done, and there was no going back. Dubcek was removed, a new leader installed, the secret police resumed their activities, protests ebbed, and authoritarianism once again returned to Czechoslovakia.

This was a severe test for the Western alliance. The Truman Doctrine had committed the USA to supporting any people or government attempting to throw off communism. In 1956, the Suez Crisis had prevented a unified, credible response to the invasion of Hungary. Surely, this was the West's time?

But it failed. It was only six years since the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was no appetite for another showdown with the USSR. Even had it wanted to, the USA was in no position to respond. It was already bogged down in an anti-communist war in Vietnam, and the full scale of the quagmire was becoming apparent, with public support for the war in free fall, and massive protests starting to be seen. The US was also in the middle of a political crisis; the 1968 election was threatening to tear the country apart. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had died at the hands of assassins' bullets, the President had been forced to abandon his re-election bid, the Democratic Party was engulfed in a civil war, race riots were rocking the largest cities, and the spectre of racist George Wallace and the hardliner Richard Nixon hung over the electorate. With the leader of the Atlantic Alliance consumed by crisis, the rest of the West hung back. The Czechoslovaks were on their own.

The long term consequences of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were huge. It created the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereby the USSR said that any attempt to leave the Eastern Bloc would be met with force by the Warsaw Pact. Across the Eastern bloc, many communists who agreed with Dubcek and wanted reform, and those who wished to see communism done away with entirely, were cowed into silence by fear that the USSR would come crashing down on them. For now, it looked as if the Soviet Union's hegemony over Easter Europe was complete.

But the crushing of the Prague Spring also showed that armed force was all that would keep the communist regimes in place. There hadn't been many Czechoslovaks committed to stopping Dubcek. The idea that communism was a force for human good and progress was shattered. The invasion also drove many left wingers in the West away from support for the communist regimes. Since the 1920s, there had been many Western communists who had either pretended that the hard edge of the Soviet system was capitalist propaganda, or acknowledged its repression by saying that a few eggs would needed to be broken in the making of the omelette of the worker's paradise. But now the USSR was clearly shown as the authoritarian dictatorship the Soviet people already knew it to be. In both East and West, support for communism began to slide.

Lastly, but perhaps most significantly, an entire generation of Czechoslovak activists was inspired by the brief period of freedom they had enjoyed. They hoped that, one day, they could reprise their moment in the sun. They were the ones who would, two decades later, take the lead in tearing down the communist regime in the Velvet Revolution.

Czechoslovak citizens confronting the Soviet soldiers in Prague

(For more photos showing the Soviet invasion, only published this week, follow this link.)

Slaying the Giant: 70 Years of the NHS

It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health... to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvements in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness...

The services so provided shall be free of charge

So reads the first two clauses of the National Health Service Act of 1946. 18 months after being given Royal Assent, the law came into force. On the 5th July 1948, the British National Health Service was born.

How great a leap of progress this was can be seen from the uptake of the new service. People presented themselves at hospitals, doctors, dentists, and opticians, many for the first time in their lives. Doctors were shocked at what they saw, appalled at the ill health of the nation. Many people had endured decades of chronic pain, living with conditions not expected to be seen in a modern democracy. Before 1948, disease and pain had been balanced by the shadow of the cost of seeking treatment. The ragtag of insurance schemes, benevolent funds, and company insurance schemes didn't even begin to cover everyone. For millions, they suffered in silence and in the shadows. But now, with the fear of not being able to afford it gone, things were different. The NHS had sent those old fears packing, forever.

It is often said to be Labour's greatest achievement. From the ashes of a difficult war and cripplingly expensive victory, Clement Attlee and his government had taken a huge step towards slaying Disease, one of the Five Giants laid out in the Beveridge Report of 1942. It was to be a pillar of the New Jerusalem they were building.

In reality, it was more complicated than that. Nye Bevan, the strident left-winger appointed as Minister of Health, cut deal after deal with deeply sceptical, conservative, medical practitioners to get the new NHS off the ground. "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he is reputed to have boasted afterwards about the consultants. And the entirely free nature of the service didn't last long. Charges were brought in the early 1950s, to pay for Britain's involvement in the Korean War. Although they were abolished in 1965, they returned after devaluation in 1968, never to be rid of again. And since the day the NHS launched, there have been arguments over the cost, waste, management, organisation, and level of private involvement. And the rumours that it is to be abolished have always swirled, never far from the surface.

Yet despite all this, the NHS is one of Britain's proudest achievements. It was the first truly universal healthcare system established anywhere in the world. It is the largest free at the point of use healthcare system anywhere in the world. It is one of the world's largest employers, and at the forefront of medical progress. 

Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor, once said of the NHS that it was the closest thing the people of England have to a religion. For once, I reckon he's right.

Nye Bevan, speaking to patients on the first day of the NHS, 5th July 1948

The Wit and Wisdom of... Bobby Kennedy, Mk III

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world, I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world.

These are different evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

It is these qualities which make of our youth today the only true international community. More than this, I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to ensure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress -- not material welfare as an end in/of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built.

Robert F Kennedy, giving the day of affirmation address at Cape Town University, 6th June 1966. Two years later to the day, he was gunned down in a hotel kitchen in California, while battling for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination for President.

Bobby Kennedy, announcing his victory in the California Primary. Minutes later, he was shot and killed.