Book Review - Churchill’s Empire - By Richard Toye - NYTimes.com

Book Review - Churchill’s Empire - By Richard Toye - NYTimes.com

Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour
— but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in
addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a
raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question
burns through Richard Toye’s superb, unsettling new history, “Churchill’s
Empire” — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

The Book Review is titled "The Two Churchills," and makes the point that for all the things we admire Churchill for, he was not always right.

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Winston Churchill, Comm-Symp

NHS at 60: A vision in which we still believe - Telegraph:

"In 1942, he [Beveridge] proposed the creation of a national health service, as part of a system of compulsory social insurance to slay 'the five giants of want, disease, squalor, ignorance and idleness'.

"Such was the enthusiasm for his ideas that there were queues to buy the report outside His Majesty's Stationery Office.

"The plans were backed a year later by the prime minister, Winston Churchill, but when the Conservatives lost the general election in 1945, Churchill's Labour successor, Clement Attlee, pledged to introduce the changes, with free medical treatment for all by the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948.

"While the plan was popular with the public, not everyone was keen.

"The British Medical Association famously opposed the creation of the NHS, with the health minister, Aneurin Bevan, later admitting that he had 'stuffed their mouths with gold' via a generous contract which allowed them to carry on doing private work, and provided lucrative bonuses."


Also, from Churchill, March 2, 1944


“The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion… Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”


And, in contrast, from the former British Medical Association Chairman, Alfred Cox, "I have examined the Bill and it looks to me uncommonly like the first step, and a big one, to national socialism as practised in Germany. The medical service there was early put under the dictatorship of a "medical fuhrer" The Bill will establish the minister for health in that capacity."

Conservatives, always so prescient.

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