The meeting in Tredegar sounds fun and appropriate.   Alas, to find  
that the Department of Health have announced "that the planned  
celebrations for the 60th anniversary of  the NHS, will include a  
"national service of celebration" for NHS  staff, patients and  
stakeholders to be held in Westminster Abbey on 2 July.  I have  
written to the Minister responsible as follows .. perhaps others could  
do likewise?

Ann Keen / Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health  [  [log in to unmask] 
   ]

Dear Ms Keen

Please tell me that your Press Release went out on April 1st?   Why is  
'our' NHS - a national institution - being celebrated with a religious  
event that will exclude many people involved with and committed to the  
NHS?   Not least - as they say in the trade - "What did the Church of  
England ever do for the NHS?"   As a teacher, writer and explorer of  
the post-war progress (and demolition) of the NHS I can find *nothing*  
which suggests that Westminster Abbey would be an honest or  
appropriate point for such celebrations.  Elton John at the Piano?   
Muffled bells? A John Taverner Lament? Cynics might argue that it is  
now time for a Requiem Mass - but surely that would be down the road  
at Westminster Cathedral?   This is a very very bad idea and I beg  
that it be dropped from the national celebratory agenda.

Mike Reddin
[log in to unmask]
http://www.publicgoods.co.uk


On 18 Jun 2008, at 09:16, alex scott-samuel wrote:


The actual 60th anniversary of the start of the National Health  
Service is Saturday 5th July

Aneurin Bevan spent that day in 1948 in Manchester, but the Socialist  
Health Association, which was founded in 1930 in order to campaign for  
the establishment of the NHS, is marking the occasion by a meeting in  
Tredegar, where Bevan was born, the man who more than any other shaped  
its present form.  We will be meeting in Bedwellty House where Bevan  
started his political career in battles with the Tredegar Iron and  
Coal Company and its representatives.  When he created the NHS, Nye  
Bevan said, "All I am doing is extending to the entire population of  
Britain the benefits we
had in Tredegar for a generation or more. We are going to  
'Tredegarise' you"

Dr Julian Tudor Hart will lead a discussion, starting at noon, on the  
principles of the National Health Service, and in particular- does the  
NHS have any future as a public service in the hands of New Labour,  
and can we be different in Wales?

Julian is one of our most distinguished members. He spent his career  
in a mining village in South Wales, from where he published, among  
other things,
The Inverse Care Law http://www.sochealth.co.uk/history/inversecare.htm
A New Kind of Doctor
Feasible Socialism. http://www.sochealth.co.uk/feasible/sha_feasible.html
The Political Economy of Health Care:A clinical perspective

see also
http://www.juliantudorhart.org/
http://www.cradleofnhs.org.uk/medical.htm
http://www.tredegartowncouncil.org.uk/House%20&%20Park/bedwellty%20house.htm

Our meeting is open to the public and without charge.


Martin Rathfelder
Director
Socialist Health Association
22 Blair Road
Manchester
M16 8NS
0870 013 0065
www.sochealth.co.uk