by Guest

contribution by Zarathustra

Nurses for Reform have been featured on Liberal Conspiracy before. They’re a campaigning group with links to the libertarian Adam Smith Institute and ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think-tanks.

Last month they met with David Cameron to discuss their ideas, which included wholesale privatisation of the NHS, the scrapping of national pay agreements for health workers and nurses being given brands like consumer products.

The idea of competing brands of nurses (None of yer manky Tesco nurses working in our hospital. We only use Sainsburys nurses) might sound daft, but this weekend Nurses For Reform crossed the line from silly to downright offensive.

Their leading spokesperspon has been strongly implying the NHS was created along Nazi principles.



The claim was made by Dr Helen Evans, NFR’s leading spokesperson and a health fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.

On the NFR’s blog she pointed to a spoof video of the film Downfall, subtitled to make it appear that Hitler was endorsing Obama’s health reforms. She then added:

The problem is that for those who know their history this is all too close to the knuckle. For in Britain the architect of the National Health Service, Sir William Beveridge, told the Daily Telegraph in November 1942 that his proposals would take Britain “…half-way to Moscow”. More significantly, after the Second World War two papers marked ‘secret’ and providing a detailed commentary on Beveridge’s plan were found in Hitler’s Berlin bunker. One ordered that publicity should be avoided but, if mentioned, the report should be used as “…obvious proof that our enemies are taking over national-socialist ideas”. The other report offered a Nazi assessment of the plan as being no ‘botch-up’. The national socialist analyst wrote that the NHS would be “…a consistent system… of remarkable simplicity…superior to the current German social insurance in almost all point”. Designed to take Britain half way to Moscow and simultaneously admired by Hitler’s inner coterie, socialised medicine and the Fabian welfare state has a particularly unsavory heritage. It is this history that makes the above film a comedy of human tragedy and one deeply rooted in the darker recesses of coercion.

This appears to be an attempt to import the “socialised healthcare = Nazism” rhetoric of the US Tea Baggers into British political discourse.

I’m an NHS employee myself. If the NHS is based on Nazi principles, what does that supposedly make me? An SS stormtrooper?

Or perhaps Dr Evans feels that I’m merely made to go along with their ideology, so maybe I’m comparable to a Wehrmacht conscript? This sort of Reductio ad Hitlerum language is an insult to the many dedicated staff of the NHS.

If it was just some fringe group making these statements, then it wouldn’t really matter. But these people are directly advising the man who may well be our next prime minister.

If David Cameron wants to show that he’s serious about defending the NHS, he might want to make a start by disowning this bunch of wingnuts.

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Zarathustra is a nurse working in child and adolescent mental health services. He edits the Mental Nurse blog.