NHS (60th Anniversary)

I join the Secretary of State in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) on calling this debate. I am delighted and privileged to be taking part in a debate celebrating 60 years of the national health service. I have heard many history lessons this evening. I was not even born in 1946, when the legislation went through the House, or in 1948, when the health service was established. However, I know from experience, throughout my life as a user of the health service, that in principle it is second to none. The national health service is what this country wants, and it is what I passionately believe in. It is ludicrous—indeed, I find it quite baffling—to try to make complaints about an era in which we were not alive. If one worked on that argument, one could say that the Labour party still wanted to take us out of Europe, that it supported CND or that it did not believe in war, as George Lansbury, its pacifist leader in the 1930s, proclaimed. However, that is nonsense, because life has moved on, and so have circumstances. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) and other hon. Members said, it is right that we should all be united on the basic premises and principles of the national health service, even though we may argue and have differences of opinion about how it should be organised and how it should evolve to continue providing a first-class health service for the people of this country. Why is the NHS so important? Why is this national institution so popular with the vast majority of people in this country, who are more than happy, as I am, to pay their tax pounds to have free health care at the point of use for all who are entitled to use it? One of the reasons is this. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt talked of the four freedoms: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech and freedom of worship. I believe that there is a fifth freedom. Some hon. Members have talked about the American experience. If we exclude those people who qualify for Medicaid and Medicare, because of their financial poverty or their age, there are more than 40 million people in the United States—working families—who cannot afford health insurance. They do not have the freedom from fear of the next health bill landing on the mat, which might financially destroy their family. They do not have the freedom from fear that illness might come into the family, either to a child or to a parent, which might financially cripple them. Since 1948, because of our national health service, everyone in this country has had the freedom from those fears. I passionately believe in and support the national health service, whether it is under a Labour Government or a Conservative Government. Let those people who say that Conservatives are not committed to the health service look back over the past 60 years. They will see that Conservative Governments were in office for 35 of those 60 years, and nothing was done under those Governments to undermine the principles of the national health service or to seek to destroy it—[Interruption.] I resent people taking cheap opportunities to try to score party political points when there is no basis in fact for that argument.