The rhetoric of the cut. The shock of contrast and the leap in time.
I realised more about where we're heading as I watched a short video in which the Guardian interviewed three people about their views on Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. They represented the past, present, and future. While strictly true in terms of their respective stages of professional development, their political stance - nay, their conscience - muddied the tenses: the GP works presently, he is bucking up for a roaring trade in his consortium. But his support for the so-called radical reforms are throwing us back in time. Campaigning against the so-called radical reforms, the retired nurse projected us into the future with hope through conscience past as she recalled the first days of the NHS. The UCL medical student has also been campaigning, embodying the future through hope as well.
Aneurin Bevin had been down the mines and so knew why a National Health Service was a good thing. He claimed a National Health Service paved the way to true socialism, blocking the way to greed and self-interest. Having barely come to terms with one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has even seen, Britain came up with the NHS. What does our time fish out of its crisis? Reforms that consolidate the greed and messiness of competition that caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Marx was right: capitalism thrives on crises; this is its revolutionary character.
Now it can thrive on the sick.
But it's the cuts in the short film. I can't remember the exact sequence, but a new sequence has formed itself in my own mind:
Aneurin Bevin in the foreground, heavy industry in the background; David Cameron's porcine seriousness in the foreground, Lansley's porcine indifference a little further in.
Mr Aneurin Bevin,
I'm so sorry.
