The Welfare State - Good, Bad or don't really care?

[-:Undertaker:-]

Firstly, I'm not driven by an obsession with equality. I am aware we're in a capitalist society. You seem to think I'm some sort of Marxist who'd love communism in place as soon as possible but I don't think Marx was completely right. Marx refers to history in that people were generally living in communist societies (much like tribes do now) and would love us to all just have a revolution and go back to that however what he fails to notice is how much society has evolved and developed. Society is just too complex now and that's why I think communism attempts have failed.

No we are not in a capitalist society, we live in an increasingly socialist-corporatist economic world which I guess you could place in the same basket as communism, just that offically many companies are labelled as 'private' when infact they are run by the state and run for the state. I am heartened you've denounced Marx, but most likely only due to the fact he carries a stigma along with other socialists; Mao/Stalin/Pot/Hitler that is best dropped when possible by the left which remains highly idealogical.

The obsession with equality is seen with your stance on the grammar schools, despite the fact that the current system appears fair - it is all but fair. The poor are left with little chance in the comprehensive system which serves not as a place of learning, but more so as large camps where teachers spend most of their time as acting social workers trying to sort out the vast number of problems that those who go to that school are involved in.

However, to say that rich paid, poor got free from charities is a very simplistic statement. If only in practice, that worked. It is much simpler to go into a hospital waiting room and wait that everyone pays for than queue up for hours on end waiting for a charity (often Church led - which would probably cause a lot of social problems nowadays too. Would they treat homosexuals as an example? A fundamentalist church might not, the same way they refused to give children to homosexual wannabe-parents) service. I do believe in America there are 'dentist tents' where the poor are offered a free checkup in a tent but they get hundreds of people queueing up that they have to turn people away. They can't keep up with demand. I think if we went back to this system, we'd have many poor people just ignoring symptoms of ill-health and dealing through the pain. This happens already so to make it worse by removing free healthcare is barbaric and draconian imo.

It did work and Canada and the United States actually copied our health system which was the best system in the world at the time. The Church example, this is where your (yourself and the left in general) obsession with minorities and so-called equality comes in;- I very much doubt any Church would do that and if it did, thats not to stop some other charitable hospital taking on that person along with the Church in question being severely demonised (not that they could do this anyway in real life, due to ridiculous equality laws which stamp all over liberty and freedom of choice). To add onto this, treating somebody in a potentially life or death situation is far more different than gay adoption - which I have no doubt you yourself fully support the situation now where we have Catholic adoption centres closing because they will not allow gay couples to adopt - another example of blind marxoid faith if that is the case.

You do pick out some far-fetched examples which do exist I agree, but also exist in the NHS - people waiting for beds, hospitals invested with superbugs not to mention a massive bungling bureaucracy that surrounds the entire thing. Infact the idea was never popular in the first place, the Attlee government spent vast sums bribing doctors into joining the NHS at a time when the nation was broke (famous quote i'll provide below). It's often said (I believe you've spoke out against industry closure in the 80s before) that Britain should have kept its industry going - well we could have, had Attlee and his Labour government used those American loans to keep British industry competitive in a post-war world. But of course this is simply brushed aside.

When the consultants rejected Bevan's national health service in 1947, he had to convert them, famously, promising to "stuff their mouths with gold".