John Sainsbury is a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University.
It's an election year in Britain, as it is in Canada. The opposition Labour Party is losing its slender lead in the opinion polls, and there's a mood of pessimism among the party faithful.
The party's problems are ones of both policy and image.
The Conservative-led coalition government's slashing of social programs – as it tries to reduce government spending, as a percentage of GDP, to 1930s levels – gives Labour an opportunity to go on the offensive. But its tepid response is to protest the scale of the cuts, without offering a coherent challenge to their rationale. "We're not as nasty as the Tories" is hardly an inspiring rallying cry.
Since losing its close identification with the working class and the trade unions, the party is still struggling to frame an identity. Like their leader, Ed Miliband, party candidates typically come across as bland, cerebral, and middle class. Yet a few months ago, some Labour MP's, nostalgic for the party's working class roots, sought to ditch Mr. Miliband and replace him with Alan Johnson, whose main appeal is that he bears the lineaments of an authentic working-class hero.
Labour's problems have prompted some panicky responses from the bien pensants of the Guardian, the New Statesman and likeminded publications. Reflecting on the spectacular emergence of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), some have called for an equivalent populism of the left.
The call on the face of it looks misguided. Populism is usually a derogatory word in the left's lexicon; its connotations are anti-intellectualism, petite-bourgeoise reactionism, and political gullibility. Successful populist movements are nearly always bad news for the established parties. Witness the misery that UKIP has caused Prime Minister David Cameron.
Yet for all the caveats, the advocates of left-wing populism do have a point, and there is one cause, above all, that cries out for populist support: defending the beleaguered National Health Service (NHS). As in Canada, the construction of a publicly-funded health care system was a populist triumph, albeit in Britain of the "Welsh valley" as distinct from the "Saskatchewan prairie" variety.
The leading champion of the NHS was Aneurin Bevan. As minister of health in the post-Second World War Labour government, he brought the service into being. The self-educated son of a Welsh miner, Bevan was a populist politician through and through. He took special satisfaction in the fact that the NHS, because it was funded directly from tax revenue, was an instrument for redistributing the country's wealth.
Because the NHS quickly won national support, it's easy to overlook that initially it was considered a populist assault on the medical establishment and its Tory cronies. The service was born to the clamour of vitriolic debate. Alfred Cox, a spokesman for the British Medical Association, called the bill establishing the service a big step toward National Socialism and dubbed Bevan "the medical Fuhrer."
Bevan escalated the rhetoric, calling the Tories "lower than vermin." In reply, Conservative leader Winston Churchill mused that, since "morbid hatred is a form of mental disease," it would be appropriate if Bevan were to be among the first to receive psychiatric attention under the NHS.
Things quieted down once the Conservative party recognized that the NHS was here to stay. What was celebrated on the Left as a stride toward full-blown socialism could be supported by Tory patricians like Harold Macmillan (prime minister, 1957 to 1963) as a practical demonstration of noblesse oblige.
The NHS was the centrepiece of a political consensus that lasted until the advent of Margaret Thatcher; and even Mrs. Thatcher, the doyenne of free market capitalism, knew better than to launch a frontal assault on this bastion of socialized medicine. As Nigel Lawson, one of her ministers, remarked, the NHS is "the nearest thing the English have to a religion."
Yet the NHS is now in shambles. In fact, a unified British health care system no longer exists, responsibility for health care having been devolved to Wales and Scotland. Meanwhile soaring costs and bureaucratic bungling are battering the English NHS. Those who can afford it are turning to private medical schemes. The founding principle of the NHS, quality care for all regardless of income, is dangerously compromised.
Enter from centre-left, Harry Smith, a 91-year-old Yorkshireman who survived both the Great Depression and service in the RAF during the Second World War. In his widely read memoir Harry's Last Stand, he recalls the horrors of his poverty-stricken childhood, which included watching his sister's slow and agonizing death from spinal tuberculosis.
His clarion call for reviving the NHS is grounded in experience, burnished by patriotism. The NHS was Britain's reward to itself for defeating Nazism, he argues. When Mr. Smith presented his case at last year's Labour party conference, the effect was electrifying. No-one will ever mistake the mild-mannered Ed Miliband for the Second Coming of Aneurin Bevan, but Mr. Miliband might find that a dose of Harry Smith style populism, in defence of the NHS, is just what the doctor ordered.