The Aneurin Bevan Lecture – Hay Festival

Transcribed by Rach @TheBendySlow

“A prophet great in anger and mighty in desire.
His words shall move the mountains and make the floods rejoice.
And the people of his passion shall lift the golden voice.
A prophet out of Gwalia shall rouse the heart again, give courage to the bosom
And beauty to the brain.”

Those are the words of the great Idris Davies from his poem Out of Gwalia, and they are words that have always seemed fitting to describe the force of nature that was Aneurin Bevan. Less a politician; more a projectile, explosively discharged from the Welsh valleys. A visionary, a disrupter, a bloody difficult man.

For many years when I was growing up in Port Talbot, for a few weeks each summer I would travel all the way to Cardiff to take part in rehearsals for the annual National Youth Theatre of Wales production, it was like getting a cap for Wales, like playing for my country. Although it did involve wearing slightly more make-up, if I’m honest. Never having been capped I can’t swear to the truth but I’m gonna go with my gut. In the city centre of Cardiff there was a statue of the great man himself Aneurin Bevan, stood there captured forever in a moment of dramatic gesture, pointing with fierce determination at the shops he now found himself surrounded by. So as a young teenager I knew the grand architect of the National Health Service as the Don’t Go to Pizza Hut man, which is how he was only ever referred to at that point. Now at this point I feel I should say there are of course many other fast food chains that Aneurin Bevan if he could but choose would admonish you to avoid. Well, he still stands there today, dynamic and defiant, but thankfully my awareness to his contribution to the history of our nation has expanded a little more.

Now I’m no expert by any means and I’m relatively new to this ball-game of talking about politics and social issues and the like, but the NHS? What the hell is that all about? Healthcare for everyone, based on individual need and not the ability to pay, and free at the point of delivery. The audacity of it, the mind-boggling ambition of it. A truly socialist policy right at the very heart of the day-to-day life of everyone in this country, and next July he will have occupied that revered place for seventy years, and it is loved passionately with a ferocity of feeling that puts the fear of God into anyone who wants to mess with it. No wonder the Tories hate it. For them every day since the fifth of July 1948 it’s been like a slap in the face on a cold day in Tredegar. From day one there’s been complaints about how much it costs, seventy years of trying to find ways round it, to take it apart secretly, with a bit of help from New Labour around the turn of this century. Of course it can’t be a full frontal attack, it has to be hollowed out from within, stretched beyond what it can cope with, demoralised and forced against the ropes. But it just keeps fighting back, because the NHS will last as long as there are folk left to fight for it.

Now Bevan himself is often quoted as having said that when in-fact it was a fictionalised version of himself who spoke those words in a play written by Trevor Griffiths, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true, and there are still plenty of people ready to fight for it. Because it stands for something. Everything we held dear, every value, belief, every precious life was being threatened by the rise of fascism. Hitler and his Nazi army tried to crash over us like a tsunami of bigotry and ignorance and murderous hatred, and we stood together. Every single part of our nation side by side, working for each other, giving what we could when it was needed. Sacrificing for the greater good, bonded together in common purpose and that common purpose triumphed. Love and unity conquered hate and division, and as we emerged from those dark days a new Labour government sought to build on that experience of collective solidarity. Out of the slathering jaws of a nightmare something truly beautiful was born. The vision of a new social compact that would embody the strength of a whole nation working together for the benefit of all. The lessons we had learned from that terrible war would now be applied to our hard won and most precious peace, and as part of that wider vision of universalism put forth by the Atlee government of 1945 our National Health Service is a symbol of all that. Those values, and all that they cost to champion them, lie deep in its DNA, and that is why the identity of this country is so closely tied to the health of our NHS.

There is an interdependence between the people of this country and the National Health Service that holds all of those values that so many died to defend. Bevan said Greek mythology had it that each tree was inhabited by a spirit called a Dryad, I believe, which died when the tree died. The pit is to the mining village what the tree is to the Dryad. When the pit dies, the village dies too. When the pit is ill, the village groans. Each is interwoven with the life of the other. Well I suggest that the NHS is to this country, what in Bevan’s description the pit was to the village. The NHS is ill and the country is groaning, and it cannot be coincidence that the very same time a new old spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of fascism. That new social compact of 1945 wasn’t just born out of the experience of the war, it was also a reaction to the hardships and suffering of the years leading up to it. Bevan said that he was haunted by the knowledge of the fine men and women whose lives were broken by the long years and unemployment and poverty that shadowed the Welsh valleys in those years between the wars.

In 1919 just two years after the Russian Revolution British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had admitted to the leaders of the Miners Federation of Great Britain, the transport workers and the railwayman that if they were to strike his government would be at their mercy. It seems the country was only spared a workers revolution by those leaders not being prepared to take over the functioning of the state. The General Strike of 1926 revealed the lengths this country would go to to fight against the exploitative working conditions forced upon them in the pursuit of profit. The Great Depression particularly affected mining and other industrial areas with unemployment, low wages and longer hours all adding to the sense of social unrest, and so that new post-war collective vision was also a realisation that the people of this country deserved better. They deserved greater protections and a fairer economic deal and that, in turn, that would lead to a more cohesive and more harmonious society. People would be happier. What’s happened to that fairer deal? Where is that vision of unity and common purpose now? Why have dangerous and divisive voices that haven’t had such sway since the last war been able to move out from the shadowy edges into the mainstream of political discussion. Why are some people so angry and so ready to be led by that anger? Because that vision that the NHS was born out of, that new fairer social compact, that interdependence that was discovered through the sacrifices of war, it has been broken and it has been betrayed.

One of the greatest failures of economic and political thought out of the last forty years has been the abandonment of humanity to the baser impulses of the market. Those impulses have broken beyond their national bonds and voraciously opened up entirely new global opportunities to massively fill the pockets of a few, while the rest are told that this will be good for everyone. Inequality has increased beyond anyone’s imagining and trust for those who should be in charge of keeping things fair has evaporated. A complacency must have set in somewhere, bred perhaps by the very safety and security that our war against fascism had made possible, and that our new post-war social compact had tried to protect with its humane and people centred vision. But eventually it just became too tempting. Once the blasts of war and the nightmare of the Nazis had faded far enough into the past then all the benefits that that safety and security had shored up on behalf of the people began to look all too much like glittering treasure, just waiting to be plundered. Instead of the many sacrificing for the greater good of all, the many became the sacrifice, all for the greater good of the few. It’s a hugely delicate balancing act to keep the economy working to favour the interests of the few while trying to appear like you’re on the side of the many, it’s a real trick, and that trick creates its own secret culture within a culture, with its own rules and language and norms, mostly unspoken but occasionally made explicit if necessary. Where it’s insisted that in order to give the rich incentive to work harder, now they must be paid more, but to make the poor work harder they have to be paid less. Where it’s believed that you mustn’t let people become too comfortable in their poverty or they’ll never want to leave it.

You see that’s the problem, the problem is that people enjoy the effects of poverty too much, so you have to give them a hard but fair kick in the face, just to get them moving and good God, when the miners were striking in 1926 over cuts to their pay even the King George V said try living on their wages before you judge them. Where the benefits of a more flexible labour market, otherwise known as the gig economy, and the place of zero-hours contracts are in-fact an invaluable strength and policy-makers are urged to retain and even enhance flexible forms of work, remember that flexible workforce was a mantra of the Labour years too. Never mind that it entails the undermining of unions and collective action, gets rid of protections against unfair dismissal, holiday pay, sick pay, redundancy pay, paid rest breaks and the right to the national minimum wage. No, they like it, they do! We’re told we shouldn’t take for granted the strengths of a British economy that has an unemployment rate lower than at any point since 1975 and overall poverty figures have remained flat since 2010, but the fact is that in-work poverty figures are soaring. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation more than seven million people are living in poverty despite being part of a working family. That includes over two and a half million children. So the old feckless workshy poor line of thinking doesn’t hold up so well anymore, and the best way out of poverty is a job is ringing a little bit hollow too.

Matthew Taylor, the man the government has appointed to do a report on modern employment said last month that the critical issue on workers’ rights was whether flexibility was two-way or one-way. He said two-way flexibility is great, and we shouldn’t do anything in our review to reduce it. What we need to tackle is one-way flexibility, where people feel they have to be available for work but are not guaranteed work. There is a quid-pro-quo about flexibility where it benefits the individual and organisation and it’s not simply about the transfer of risk, because today inequality is not just about a transfer of money from the poor to the wealthy, it’s also about a transfer of risk from the wealthy to the poor. All the risk is heaped onto the unprotected by those who are the most protected, and it’s a lot easier to do that when you don’t have to walk down the same streets and look them in the face. Bevan said free people can use free institutions to solve the social and economic problems of the age if they are given the chance to do so. If they are given the chance to do so, that’s a very big ‘if’ Nye.

How free can you really be when you’re weighed down by ever increasing personal debt, if you’re being preyed on by exploitative high-cost credit and rent-to-own companies because that’s all that’s available for the likes of you. When the less you have the more you pay, are you really being given a sporting chance when you’re not allowed to play on a level playing field? At the Conservative manifesto launch recently Theresa May made a promise to take back control of EU structural funds and use them to strengthen our union and reduce inequalities between our communities. Now that’s the same Conservative party that set aside three hundred million pounds of Whitehall cash to help local councils deal with the drastic changes to local government funding that were being meted out so of course that money would go to those areas being hardest hit, the ones losing their public services and amenities, the ones where the people are really struggling. No, no. Only last year it was revealed that that money would overwhelmingly go to such counties as Surrey, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and West Sussex. Why are some people so angry, and so ready to be led by that anger? Those who have money have power. Those who represent those with money have access to that power, and together they will always tend to try and keep things that way.

The history of power in this country has not been one long story of powerful interests spreading their power around willingly, as and when the poor and dispossessed ask for it. The Sutton Trust report of last year revealed that although seven percent of the population attended independent fee-paying schools, across all the top jobs in our country they were massively overrepresented. Seventy one percent of top military officers, seventy four percent of top judges, fifty one percent of leading print journalists, sixty one percent of top doctors, half the government cabinet and so on. Again, why are some people so angry and so ready to be led by that anger? Bevan said it is an axiom enforced by all the experience of the ages that they who rule industrially will rule politically. So who rules industrially today? Well clearly things have moved on since 1919 and that meeting between Lloyd George and the workers leaders. There was a similar scare in the 1970s when the National Union of Mineworkers was deemed to have become too powerful and eventually led to Margaret Thatcher declaring all-out war on unions in general and the NUM in particular. The Miners’ Strike of 84-85 became what looks in retrospect now like a final stand to defend not just meaningful representation for miners, but for workers generally, for the communities that they built and for the very concept of togetherness that had given rise to that precious post-war of solidarity in the first place. Suddenly there was no such thing as society. Since turning away from investing in the so-called real economy based on those great manufacturing industries of our past we have increasingly turned towards the more rarefied and opaque world of the financial services industry. Where the all-powerful and all-knowing market rules. Where regulation is the great oppressor and self-interest ultimately serves all. Well, the financial crisis of 2008 seemed to expose all the flaws inherent to those beliefs, those same old baser motives of the market led to the pursuit of profits on an almost unimaginably avaricious scale. A combination of weak regulation, governmental blindness and the willingness to reduce people to mere numbers on a spreadsheet.

To be manipulated and exploited meant that the western economy almost came crashing down around our ears. Only by bailing out the banks and others parts of the financial industry with colossal amounts of taxpayer’s money were we able to stave off global disaster. So you’d think that there would have a collective realisation at that point that things had gone very wrong somewhere. That the drift away from that post-war vision of interdependence had led us to a really bad place. An almost catastrophic place, and perhaps we should re-evaluate the Thatcherite worship of market forces and the logic of capital and the restructuring of industry around ever more ruthless efficiency measures, regardless of how it affects actual people. Away from the attitude of what does it matter if people are having a hard time if the economy is doing well? But, you know what actually happened? Not that. What actually happened in this country was that Labour got the blame for spending too much, there was a general election where the Labour party decided not to correct that total misunderstanding of what happened, they lost, the new government said because of the deficit we would have to be subjected to austerity measures, ranging from the grossly cruel and punishing to the mildly annoying and irksome depending on what part of the country you live in. Then we got Brexit, then we got Trump and then Theresa May said it might be a good idea to start putting workers on boards, and then she changed her mind about it. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth – George Orwell from 1984.

When those at the top have a vision of society that has people at its heart and that humane vision forms the basis of their policy then that humanity spreads throughout the whole society. When those at the top see people merely as numbers, as votes, monetary units, commodities, figures on a chart, anything but living and breathing human beings who love and who hope and who suffer, then that dehumanisation leaks out and trickles down and festers among us all like a poisonous mould. We perceive everything around us in terms of how it all relates to what we are in ultimate pursuit of. If I want to cut a package open and have nothing sharp to hand I go into my kitchen and I start looking around for a knife, and as I move around the kitchen I judge everything I see by its potential ‘knife-iness’ because of my particular aim, getting that package open. Everything I see is reduced to whether it helps me achieve that aim or not. Regardless of how many other wonderful useful qualities those things in my kitchen may contain, if they can’t help me get that package open they are of no use to me. Now if my aim is purely make as much profit as I can, to increase shareholder value above and beyond all else, if that is what everything around me incentivises me to do, now how am I being encouraged to view you? How does that shape my relationship to the community around me? What am I helping to turn this country into? The Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler said it is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men, who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. If you don’t start with people then you shouldn’t start at all. Empathy, fellow feeling, compassion.

No matter where we might end up, these must always be where we start from. If we can’t begin by connecting with basic human experience, no matter what side of an argument we’re on, no matter where our political allegiances lie, if compassion and empathy don’t form the foundation of our decision-making process then how can any of those decisions be trusted? Now, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t really hard calls to be made around very difficult and very complicated issues, but it is a warning against making those decisions or forming those opinions by turning off our ability to empathise. No matter how justified our feelings of anger, no matter how keen our sense of betrayal, because compassion is not something we can switch on and off. Anything that involves human beings anywhere should concern us, now how we respond to those concerns depends on all kinds of things, how it relates to our priorities, whether we can actually be effective, whether or not it’s appropriate to respond at all. But if we don’t at least begin from a place of empathy and compassion, no matter who it affects, no matter where they may come from, then where’s our cut-off point? Maybe it starts with a different country but then where’s next? Different part of our own country? Different town, street, a different family member? The saying charity begins at home doesn’t mean that we should only be charitable to our nearest and dearest which of course means it’s not charity at all. It means that we develop our capacity for compassion by giving and receiving it to those we already love, so then we can take it out into the world and practise compassion beyond the confines of our own front door. Now empathy is difficult, it needs encouragement, it needs support. To imagine a day-to-day life in circumstances other than our own is not easy.

To dare to travel beyond our own personal borders can be a frightening thing. What we already know makes us feel safe. To beyond the known, to imaginatively and emotionally enter the life of another person can sometimes take an act of courage. In the long past the church saw acting as a sin, for attempting to persuade others that they could inhabit multiple lives they were performing an act of blasphemy. God has given us one soul, they said, to pretend otherwise is heresy! A transgression. But it is that same imaginative transgression that is the source of empathy. To look out from behind the eyes of another, just for a moment and be forever changed by it. That is how we connect, that is how we build bridges between our separated lives. That is how we unite division. Now I wonder what possible interest those in power might have in dissuading people from uniting through empathy. It’s almost like a divided people might be better for those in power, like a people who see each other as the enemy, entrenched in their own tribal factions might allow the real elites to go unchecked and unnoticed. The super wealthy and powerful that you never see, whose lives are fiercely protected from anything like the prying eyes of the mucky-faced public. They can then quietly continue to pull on the levers of power and dictate the circumstances of all our lives.

In her book Wave in the Mind the writer Ursula K. Le Guin said the exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. The story-teller is the truth-teller. So how are our story-tellers faring today? Well, earlier we heard how the Sutton Trust report has revealed that when it comes to representation some stories are more equal than others. How people from certain economic backgrounds get to tell their stories loudly and on the most important stages all across our society, while those from less advantaged backgrounds, their stories are quite a bit quieter and get heard a lot less. Access to the arts and culture is increasingly being restricted to the privileged few as drama, dance and music gets cut from more and more state schools. Unpaid internships are the only way to get a foot in the door across a lot of the industry and only for those who can afford to work for nothing. The national press is in the ownership of a handful of ideologically driven billionaires while local journalism has been all but totally neutered. According to the National Union of Journalists as of 2015 a hundred and fifty local titles have closed since 2008, as the country’s big four local media groups cut costs in the face of declining advertising revenue.

Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust said as these papers close, or as they’re hollowed out closing local offices and running news gathering from a hub in a city miles from people’s lives, we are gradually creating a serious democratic deficit. You need professional journalists holding people to account, he said. There used to a career route for young reporters on local papers to move to nationals, bringing regional knowledge and a respect for their area. Now there are many national journalists who skip that stage altogether, which is one of the reasons the national media, and to some extent Westminster itself, can seem out of touch with the rest of the country. The most hardened warriors throughout history, from Alexander the Great to General James Mattis have all understood that it’s dangerous to limit the information at your disposal. They’ve known the importance of having people around them unafraid of giving them the news they don’t want to hear, who come up with creative ideas that challenge their assumptions that burst their bubble, because they know that their survival depends on it. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be told what to think or what to feel by the same old voices, we have to dare to be challenged, to look for other opinions and not just the ones that reinforce what we already think. We can only become more strong and more resilient by it. If the people who tell our stories increasingly come from only one kind of background, have only one kind of story to tell, then we will stop listening. Perhaps we already have. If our stories don’t reflect the broad spectrum of our lives as a nation then we will have a nation that doesn’t feel listened to, and that is a dangerous situation to be in. Bevan said that a political leader in a democracy must articulate the wants, the frustrations, the aspirations of the masses. Their hearts must be moved by his words, so his words must be attuned to their realities. The NHS didn’t spring from the mind of one man fully formed, it wasn’t conjured by a committee in some metropolitan office HQ.

Fundamental to an understanding of why the National Health Service has worked so well and for so long is recognising that it emerged from a model routed in the realities of a local community. That model was the local community self-help scheme by the Tredegar Workman’s Medical Aid Society. Every part of that community had come together to address their very real needs and to find a workable solution. Out of this they established the Tredegar Park Cottage Hospital. Funding came from all over Tredegar, local industry and employers, donations from individuals and public donations. But above all it came from the men employed in the pits who agreed to have money from their wages deducted each week to keep it maintained, and Bevan was its management committee’s chairman. The principal of universal donation during fitness for universal provision during illness grew out of the realities of that Tredegar community and went on to become what has been described as the most far-reaching piece of social legislation in British history. When he created the NHS Bevan said all I’m doing extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more. We are going to Tredegarise you.

The NHS was innovative and it was visionary but above everything else it grew out of the real experiences of people. They weren’t give a list of boxes to tick, they weren’t given a bunch of targets to meet, they weren’t told what was best for them by people who didn’t know them, they recognised the need because it was their own. They got the tools to find the solution and they came together to make it happen. I’ve heard different versions of that same story happening all over our country today. It’s happening in Bromley-by-Bow. In the early 1980s a run-down church in a poor area of London opened a small café in their church hall, right opposite the local school. They started listening to the single mums who would come in for a cup of tea after dropping their kids off, and things began to happen. Over the years it’s grown and developed and turned into the most innovative, forward-looking NHS health and community centre I have ever seen. It delivers services in a totally holistic and revolutionary way because it has placed people and their lived experiences firmly at the centre of every single choice and decision they make. It’s happening in Birmingham. A young woman named Immy wanted to find someone to start a conversation with about how to make her city a better place to live. That conversation started at one small table upstairs at a coffee shop and has been growing and growing ever since. Immy and her friends have gone from being laughed at and derided by the city establishment to now being sought out for advice and help by those very same people They’ve established the Impact Hub of Birmingham to give platform to the movement they’re now a part of, where innovative solutions are being developed around systemic challenges for their city and beyond. It’s like a Willy Wonka chocolate factory for good ideas and it grew out of the real experience of people who want to make where they live a better, happier place. And it’s happening in Preston. The local council are bringing key local institutions together, institutions that form anchors for the Preston area and encouraging them to coordinate around community wealth-building.

Just like that Tredegar model people and organisations with real skin in the game who are in Preston for the long haul, the councils, the colleges and universities, the hospitals, the police force are being empowered to work together using a cooperative model to tackle inequality, they are ensuring the economic development of the place they live in is shared more equally among its residents. And it’s working, you can tell that by seeing how many other city representatives are stepping off the train at Preston station these days to take a look. All these versions of the same story are working because they have a common purpose. They are all responding to the realities of people’s actual needs, that is how they grow. That is why they’re effective and that can’t happen overnight. It takes more than a few visits with a clipboard, it takes time and it takes commitment, but it also takes encouragement. Needs can be difficult things to voice, sometimes it can feel like admitting weakness. I need help, I’m needy. The nation that fought and defeated the Nazis is not a nation altogether comfortable with what can feel like admitting weakness. It’s a nation that keeps calm and carries on. A nation of decent hard-working ordinary people. Unnatural pride in resilience and straightforwardness can too easily start to become a tyranny that forces complicated people with complicated lives into a silent conformity that still allows them to qualify as ordinary. Well there’s no such as thing as ordinary, I’m not ordinary, nor are you. There’s not one ordinary person in here. There’s not one out there either. Complexity is not the sole property of privilege. We all feel things we think we shouldn’t and don’t feel things we think perhaps we should. We all have thoughts now and again that scare us or worry that we might not really be who we spend so much of our time trying to convince everyone, including ourselves, that we are.

Only by having the courage to share our real experiences with each other can we possibly discover what we actually need to improve our lives, as both communities and as individuals. If we feel too scared to do that or if we aren’t given the platform or the support to even have that opportunity then we are doomed to keep coming up with totally ineffective ways of helping ourselves. Because our real needs aren’t being voiced, let alone met. In his poem The Gift Outright Robert Frost writes something we were withholding made us weak until we found that it was ourselves we were withholding from the land of living and forthwith found salvation in surrender. 

There is a war that rages in each of us between the good and bad angels of our natures. I mean who here never feels greed or selfishness or prejudice or resentment? The knowledge of our own inner impurity can sometimes be too much. It can shame us into silence and denial; even perhaps drive us to accuse others of the very things we fear we may be silently hiding within ourselves. In punishing others, we punish ourselves. We try to smash the mirror because of what it reflects back to us. Because of our own fears, so much of us still lies undiscovered. Whole communities and so many people within those communities waiting undiscovered. They’re not ordinary people, this is not an ordinary country, but it may be an undiscovered country. Potential waiting to be unleashed, energy waiting to be channelled, frustration waiting to be made feel useful. Thankfully, we are not our own worst parts, in-fact if we can have the courage to own those parts of ourselves, to enter that undiscovered country and give voice to what has been too long neglected, then perhaps those very same things that too often shame us into silence or blame can instead become what brings us together. They can become the very things that allow us to connect. They can be what we use to guide back to that common purpose and that shared vision that Aneurin Bevan and the people of Tredegar created, our beautiful National Health Service out of, because people are not knives and people are not mirrors. People are the centre, people are the heart, people are the reason first and last. They are the ones that populate the undiscovered country and that is where our future lies. Nothing about the future is fixed; it is the choices we make today that create the inevitabilities of tomorrow. We can shape our future, not just be shaped by it, but only if we do so by choice. We can choose to put people back at the heart of it. We can choose an economy that rewards responsibility, not greed. A social economy that grows at the service of the community. We can choose to share the wealth that that economy creates more equally. We can choose to give communities more control over their own needs, and like Tredegar all those years ago help point us the way to effective solutions for all. We can choose to make sure that everyone, no matter what their background, no matter what school they went to, no matter what their story, we can choose to give the opportunity to them, to lift the golden voice, to move those mighty mountains and make those floods rejoice. God bless Aneurin Bevan and God bless the National Health Service. Thank you.  

Michael Sheen, Hay Festival 3^rd June 2017