The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’.
The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. Certainly most of those now dying under its care have paid taxes for it throughout their working lives, in the name of this proposition. Now we hear from the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, that it frequently neglects old people, often to the extent of killing them. Why does this surprise anyone? It is in the nature of a service which forbids genuine choice to patients that it will end up suiting the convenience of those who work in it rather than meeting the needs of the sick. Until money truly follows the patient, each old person walking into a hospital will be seen by those working in it as an additional burden, getting in the way of treating others. More than 60 years of state medicine have almost killed off the original Christian ‘Big Society’ motives behind nursing and replaced them with trade union ones. The wider culture increasingly sees ‘assisted’ dying as positively virtuous, and the contempt that this implies for the value of an old person’s life therefore spreads through the nursing profession. The old people now being killed by the NHS are of the generation which most fervently believed in it. Their hopes are being dashed. We shall never have humane health care in this country until we understand that the creation of the NHS — though not the subsidy of health care for the poor — was a moral mistake.
Forty years on this week, and the decimalisation of our coinage still upsets me whenever I think about it. This measure was wrongly conceived from the first. The spur to the change was concern for exports — because some of the Commonwealth was going decimal — a pro-EEC desire to be ‘European’ and a vague sense that a decimal currency was more modern. But a currency, particularly in its small change, should surely be judged by its acceptance among the people. This subject was carefully avoided. The very existence of the Whitehall working party set up in 1961 to consider how to go decimal was concealed from the public. There was never any widespread popular demand for change, and the argument that people would find a decimal system easier was true in practice only of those who rarely used it, i.e. foreigners. From an educational point of view, our duodecimal system was preferable because it taught children how to count in different bases. People brought up before decimalisation are almost invariably better at mental arithmetic than those born since. When we lost our shillings and pence, as when, more gradually, our weights and measures were subverted, we lost the full meaning of many of our nursery rhymes, jokes and proverbs. We also lost the actual coins, all of them superior in design to what replaced them and all, because they remained in circulation so long (it was common in the 1960s to receive a Victorian penny in change), of historical interest. We gained nothing worth having. Indeed, this is literally true, since the inflation of the Heath/Wilson years made the new coins almost valueless.
At the time of the change (I was 14), I vowed never to utter the new values, but to make an instant conversion every time. Thus my first pint of beer, bought in a pub the following year, cost, I insisted, ‘two and six’ (12.5p). I stuck to this vow until my future wife understandably said that she would have nothing more to do with me unless I changed. But although I made this sacrifice for love, I still think that the story of decimalisation provides a classic proof of the superiority of conservatism over what Michael Oakeshott called ‘rationalism’. There was no problem with the duodecimal system which our culture could not handle creatively, poetically, comically and efficiently. As with so many things touted at the time as modern, the switch now seems grotesquely out of date, all genuine problems of conversion having been solved by the microchip.
Sad news of the death of Peter Pilkington, formerly the Head Master of King’s Canterbury and High Master of St Paul’s. Peter, who, before those promotions, was my Master-in-College at Eton, was an interesting and attractive combination — a clergyman who was both devout and worldly. He had a strong and subtle faith, but he loved the social position of the Church of England, and he was, like Dr Johnson, ‘no friend to enthusiasm’. It still makes me laugh to think of Peter, in his dog-collar, outraged that some evangelical boys had arranged their own prayer group on the premises: ‘Boys praying in my house! How dare they?’ In the 1990s, Peter grew disillusioned with the state of Anglicanism, and considered becoming a Roman Catholic. At the same time, he was sounded out for the House of Lords. He went to Cardinal Hume and said: ‘If I become a Catholic priest, could I accept a peerage?’ The Cardinal told him he could not, because the Pope forbade priests to be legislators. ‘Oh well,’ said Peter, ‘I think I’ll stay an Anglican.’ He became the Revd Canon Lord Pilkington of Oxenford. This story is made the more enjoyable by the fact that Peter himself was the only source for it. I believe that the truth was different, and that his spiritual struggles were real, but he would not have wanted people to know that.
Peter Pilkington was famous among his pupils for various dictums, some apocryphal, all in character. One, on the vexed question of teenage homosexuality, was ‘I don’t mind a bit of mutual masturbation, but I do draw the line at buggery.’ Sadly, this Anglican via media is now under attack from both sides of the debate, and so the entire communion threatens to split. Peter was also an exponent of the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument beloved of housemasters. Once he caught me not wearing cufflinks and exclaimed: ‘You’ll end up a heroin addict.’ At the time, I was annoyed, but the fact is that I do wear cufflinks and I am not a heroin addict, so perhaps he put me on the right path.
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