Let me take you back to 1942. It was not a good time and there are parallels with the present. Our army had been effectively defeated and had retreated from Dunkirk. Our food was blockaded by the Nazi U-boats, and we were subjected to nightly air raids. We are seeing in the images from Ukraine what we saw daily in our cities, smouldering ruins, firefighters and ambulances, and people still trying to get to work on their bicycles. Everyone queued at the shops for everything, and we all were poor apart from those we called spivs who operated in the ‘black market’.
This was the year the Liberal, Sir William Beveridge, with wife Janet and his committee, produced a report pointing the way forward for society. Many of you will have heard about this at school, as did I â his aim to eradicate the five great evils of society: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. He called these ‘giants on the road to post-war reconstruction’. In their introduction, they stated:
A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
You know what happened, but first with dominantly American help we won the war. A modest and undemonstrative leader of the Labour Party, hardened by experience in the East End of London and the trenches of the First World War, became Prime Minister in 1945 and within four years set up the Welfare State, the greatest social revolution ever in the UK. Not all the beneficiaries of this appreciated the attendant austerity and cost (borrowing from the USA, not to be repaid until the 1990s) and turned back to Churchill. But the Welfare State survived and we have all been its beneficiaries. We didn’t think of it as a revolution (as in Russia in 1918) but it was, a bloodless one proposed and effected by those two remarkable men â Beveridge and Attlee â by purely political means.
Let us look again at those historic evil giants in today’s context. Want means an inability to afford the necessities for a decent life, again widespread through our society, especially among the young and pensioners. Disease in 1942 meant tuberculosis and the fatal childhood infections â now we think of antibiotic resistance, viral epidemics, and the degenerative diseases of an ageing population. Ignorance means failure of part of the population to acquire basic social, language and mathematical skills â now look at the declining achievements of Scottish school leavers. Squalor means homelessness and begging, poor housing. There are many more beggars on the streets of our cities than we ever saw in the 1950s. Idleness means unemployment or precarious employment. Now, many of our graduates and school leavers find themselves in this latter state, as others drift down to London for jobs. All of these relate to lack of sufficient income and opportunity; the key to this lies in the adjective, sufficient. What is sufficient?
The fact is that if you are poor you are condemned to struggle for everything. Poor housing and diet will make you more susceptible to illness for which you are likely to get less efficient healthcare despite the efforts of the NHS. Your schooling is more likely to be less effective and social pressures will increase your risks of accidents, drug and alcohol issues. Your attractiveness to employers will be low, and you may end up on the street.
In the present context and for the future, you will also face competition from migrants. I think of migrants as Darwinian survivors of all these giants in their homeland and on their journey here. By definition, they are successful survivors and will provide hard competition for jobs â they are on the way up. If well received, they will make a contribution to our society and economy. If you doubt this, look at the Cabinet or the presenters on television, or the doctors in your surgery â many, sons and daughters of migrants. But our gain is a loss to their parents’ homelands.
The big picture is of a world in which all struggle to survive and thrive, and the mark of a humane society, of civilisation, is that we elect those who govern us believing their promises to make life better for all of us. Unfortunately, the advertising industry has so inured us to lies about the benefits and desirability of commercial products that its analogue, the public relations industry, had taken on its clothes and is in the habit of taking money from politicians and their parties to embroider their lies and over-optimistic forecasts.
In medicine, PR stands for an invasive personal examination of the nether regions, the very place through which the PR industry often speaks. Thus, we seem to have arrived at a state of crisis in the UK with a government that has lost all credibility, a Prime Minister who seems to lack common sense and whom none of us voted for, and a silver spoon Chancellor who is wedded to an 80-year-old ideology that has proved to be a failure and is driving us, in the words of its founding spirit, on the road to serfdom.
How ironic that the ideas Friedrich Hayek propounded in 1945 from his fear of socialism should have had, through the agency of first Thatcher and now Kwarteng, exactly the effect he expected from the ideas of Maynard Keynes. I wish it were not so, but they have. The UK is travelling fast on that downward road, its once proud position as a leader in Europe now trashed and its economy heading for the basket. But there are signs that give reason for optimism. At last, the public is beginning to realise we have been duped by lies and empty promises. People are realising that there are hard times ahead and many more will have to switch to survival mode. These are indeed desperate times in the UK but, even worse, this also applies to the concept of civilisation itself and its attack by climate change.
I have no doubt that the situation in UK and Europe is as revolutionary a time as it was in 1942, and that this needs a revolution in both our governance and in our own behaviour. The only wise words I have heard from our four recent pathetic and ineffective Prime Ministers were Johnson’s presumably insincere reference to the need for levelling up. This is at the heart of socialism. It requires a revolution among both politicians and public, essentially to move from selfishness to selflessness, from motivation by money to motivation by a desire for a fulfilled and healthy life for all. It requires, perhaps, a change to looking for growth not in gross domestic product, a measure of how much we spend and which has led to climate change, but in gross domestic contentment.
Now, the time has come for a social and political revolution in Britain to address inequity, summarised as Beveridge’s five giants; inequity that has grown on the fruits of a fear of what are, after all, not just socialist ideals but also virtues espoused by all major religions. We need to confront the evils of inequity, warfare, disease and climatic disaster, and to do this with all of Europe and our allies round the world.
A new government must regain the respect we have lost, and it can do this by showing that it is joining in effective action on levelling up and addressing the refugee crisis. In doing this, it needs to emulate a great wartime leader and tell us of the need to make personal sacrifice for the greater good. There are obvious things to do, and it will take courage. I seriously doubt that there will be another opportunity if the one provided by the next election is missed and I hope that election will be soon.
Anthony Seaton is Emeritus Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Aberdeen University and Senior Consultant to the Edinburgh Institute of Occupational Medicine. The views expressed are his own