As the ‘NRx movement’ plots to replace democracy with corporate-feudal dictatorship, Britain must pursue a radical alternative of local food security and genuine wealth redistribution to withstand the coming upheaval, writes ALAN SIMPSON
Latest editorial
Why Nye Bevan deserves a festival
Why Nye Bevan deserves a festival
It was the workers' own healthcare model in his home town of Tredegar that inspired the socialist's greatest work — the NHS — and it is in his home town that once a year we celebrate him and his ideals, writes MARK TURNER
The Guyanese scholar’s groundbreaking work revealed how Europe deliberately underdeveloped Africa while using its resources and people to fuel Western capitalism, writes ROGER MCKENZIE
By making Personal Independence Payments harder to access, Labour is creating another barrier for those already struggling with soaring care costs, workplace discrimination and prejudiced employers, argues RUTH HUNT
With Labour abandoning its base through welfare cuts and warmongering, a genuine progressive alternative is urgently needed but must avoid any whiff of Trump infatuation syndrome and national populism, argues ANDREW MURRAY
Ways of opposing the increasingly repressive measures from the British state against protesters will be discussed at the Arise Festival. BEN HAYES reports
The controversial legislation now threatens even more vulnerable people after the committee stage stripped away the key High Court safeguard that convinced many MPs to support it, writes Dr CAJETAN SKOWRONSKI
While the West celebrates Duterte’s extradition, the selective application of international law reveals deeper geopolitical motives behind the prosecution of a leader from a poor, exploited nation, argues KENNY COYLE
NYE BEVAN was ultimately responsible for the establishing the NHS in 1948. But the Tredegar politician and MP for Ebbw Vale, who became minister for health and housing in 1945, had an ideal model on which to base his new health service, which has been described as “the most far-reaching piece of social legislation in British history.”
That model was the local community self-help scheme run by the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society on which Bevan had served as a committee member in the 1920s.
When he created the NHS, Bevan said, “All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more. We are going to ‘Tredegar-ise’ you.”
More from this author
MARK TURNER is thrilled by the the British singer’s tribute to the late great Sarah Vaughan
MARK TURNER gets over his discomfort that US cultural imperialism means we know more about US subcultures than our own
Similar stories
MEIC BIRTWISTLE wanders through an exhibition that captures the soul of the Valleys, past and present, as Archdruids rub shoulders with Cuban ambassadors in Pontypridd
While revisiting his old postie haunts of Harhill, MATT KERR is reminded that Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan did build, post-WWII, something that has stood the test of time. Very little else has, if we are honest
