From that point on, any increased expenditure on the Service would come from its planned expansion and not from unpredictable use and abuse. Group consultation would put the knowledge and experience of all at the disposal of each, and the natural desire to stand well in the eyes of his fellow craftsmen would tend to raise and maintain standards.

No doubt a little of this objection is still based on the confusion about contributions to which I have referred. per cent of the expenditure of the hospitals lies outside the jurisdiction of the hospital authorities. What it can and must do is to set aside an agreed proportion of the national revenues for the creation and maintenance of the service it has pledged itself to provide. Freedom of discussion and a readiness to add to, and receive from, the corpus of accepted knowledge, are the only ways we have yet discovered to safeguard what we have gained, and to open ways to new discoveries. It is therefore an act of collective goodwill and public enterprise and not a commodity privately bought and sold.It would be a fanatical supporter of the competitive society who asserted that the work done in the field of preventive medicine shows the enslavement of the individual to what has come to be described in the United States as ‘statism’, and is therefore to be deplored.

This sustains my contention that no government that attempts to destroy the Health Service can hope to command the support of the British people. He puts the case for Democratic Socialism in this book and explains the ideas behind the NHS and Welfare State. He left us with the NHS and council housing which it is taking modern neo-corporatist politicians generations to destroy and the reasoning behind them is crucial to allow future generations choices. The mystery is well told, as Helen delves into the seedy underbelly of Edinburgh, and finds out some secrets that others will kill to keep hidden. In the first place the general public has no great faith in the medical profession considered as a collectivity, which in no way interferes with a warm attachment between individual doctors and patients.note 1) But a large proportion of this sum was being paid on private account before the Service started. Catriona McPherson was born in the village of Queensferry in south-east Scotland and left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics. It is not difficult to imagine many of the positive proposals that Sillars makes in the book becoming the focus of mainstream political discussion in an independent Scotland. Hospitals are grouped in such a way that most, if not all, the different medical specialties are to be found within a given area. I usually met its representatives when they had come hot from a conference at which the wildest speeches had been made, frequently by the very men who then had to try to come to terms with the people they had been so immoderately denouncing.