If anyone was the "father" of the NHS,it was another of your bogey people...a liberal,William Beveridge.

The Tories had it in the manifesto because after the war people were determined never to go back to the Tory-assisted misery of the 30's...so the Tories had to adopt some things like that so as not to be completely laughed out of towm..

As it was,they still had no chance,made even worse by Churchill's despicable "Gestapo" jibe at Labour..

Doncha just love those right wingers who spread ridiculous knee jerk slags of Labour of that kind?

Edited by legaleagle (18 Mar 2017 10.19am)

Similar to Bevan's "lower than vermin" jibe you mean?

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]

The sort of reasonable thought process we have come to expect from the left.

And Churchill said: “No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.”

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]

I expect he had in mind the sort of politically correct oppression that we now have where people lose their jobs for making some innocuous remark, or bakeries are persecuted for not putting slogans on their products that support various policies that the 'progressives' champion, or people given criminal records for questioning the wisdom of some 'progressive' dogma.

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]

A ridiculous statement.

Our entire modern society evolved and revolves around enterprise. Social reform needs money and you need a system in place to make it happen.
If you want someone to congratulate for that thank Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell. They are as good a candidates as any. It was freedom from absolute rule and religious dogma that allowed the industrial revolution and all that comes with it good and bad to happen. There would be no Labour Party or any kind of decent living standard without it.