Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and the photograph on the left – taken covertly last weekend at a top secret boot camp for Tory operatives soon to be charged with ‘fixing’ the NHS – tells us only too clearly what the Tories have in mind for our health service. But illuminating as such images are, to gain a fuller picture we have also to look at the legal framework on which such proposed activities hang, and the legal framework on which the National Health Service hangs is the National Health Service Act 1946, and its derivatives, temporal and spiritual, including the National Health Service Acts 1977 and 2006, and most recently the proposed Health and Social Care Bill, currently at committee stage before Parliament.
The first notable change is the name: gone are the references to ‘National’ and ‘Service’; instead we now have ‘Health’, conveniently bundled with that great Tory fiscal irritation, ‘Social Care’. At a stroke, the National Health Service has lost its special status, and been teamed up with just another drain on the public purse.