Yesterday Twitter erupted, to general Labour delight, with a hashtag trending topic #welovethenhs. Superficially this was a reaction to Dan Hannan's comments on Fox News. (I haven't watched Mr Hannan's interview so I'm not going to refer to it again.) Here was the twittering populace, rising up, to give example after example of the wonderful health provision they had received from the NHS, so stick that up yer social insurance model, Johnny Foreigner. (It's funny, and sorry, this is already an interlude, and I must learn to stick to the topic, but it does strike me: do you remember, in the 80s, whenever the Left wanted us to change tack on any issue, it was Sweden this, Sweden that; but when it comes to the NHS, anyone who so much as examines the operating model in any other country is condemned as some sort of traitor? I think a Labour commenter on the Hannan thread yesterday actually used that word. Anyway it's us with the Sweden this, Sweden that thing now, come to education, and a good thing too).
Now, you know I seek selection for a parliamentary seat, and so I'm already aware that I have to choose my words carefully, because apparently if you deviate by an iota from any agreed script you are gaffe-prone and evidence of a split ('gaffe' is one of those words which is used by no-one except political obsessives; I think regular deployment is a signal to get out a bit more, to where people disagree with each other over a range of matters all the time. I work in scientific research, and I do wonder, sometimes, what would happen at work if we applied Westminster Village rules. A colleague presents a proposed experiment to investigate some therapeutic hypothesis. I don't respond by examining his case, but I jump up and shout: but this is a slightly different theory to any number of other ones published in the peer-reviewed literature! Yet you claim to work with us! This is a gaffe! You are destroying our scientific credibility! Unless we all say exactly the same thing all the time about everything we will be ridiculed as, er, gaffers, and, er...), but as it happens, on this topic, I don't have to choose my words with care, I can deploy them with gay abandon [stop it, Graeme - Ed]: I do love the NHS. I can't imagine Britain without it, and nor would I want to. Lots of us owe it everything.
So why did that #welovethenhs tag annoy me so much?
Apply some amateur deconstruction. I thought the intent behind #welovethenhs was clear. This wasn't a spontaneous chance to list all the reasons why we might love the NHS. It was a calculated attempt to make Conservatives sign up to a single viewpoint, that the current manifestation of the NHS is simply unimproveable, and that to question any aspect of its operation is to be On The Wrong Side Of The Debate. Another tedious, pointless, fictional dividing line. I'm sure I'm not wrong. Throughout the day, mischievous leftists like the frankly adorable Sunder Katwala (who has the best avatar on Twitter, the sight of which always makes me smile (follow him @NextLeft)) kept messaging things like 'Why aren't you writing #welovethenhs, Tories?').This morning I read that Andy Burnham is going to use the mass of #welovethenhs tweets to mount a campaign against the Conservatives. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
This is an annoying tool which the left have been deploying for some time. It's like those ridiculous pre-election petitions which candidates are urged to sign by this or that lobby group, saying that they won't fight dirty over immigration or homosexuality or homosexual immigration or whatever. It's insulting (I don't require to sign a petition to prove I'm not a racist - in what sense 'prove', by the way?) and a tool to shut down discussion over an issue, because by not 'fighting dirty', the lobby group really means 'don't deviate from our own political line'. I'm not ever going to play that game.
I'm not bigging myself up: I'm only an amateur blogger on a party supporter website. But what would be the point of writing here at all, if I ever modulated my reasoning through a prism of what is and what is not acceptable? It doesn't pour out of me unmodulated, anyway. I do try and think through the impact of my words on those who might read them, and one of my few strong dislikes is reserved for people who go out of their way to choose words deliberately in order to wound. (To say that I have a 'strong dislike' of such behaviour is an example of modulation. My actual feelings about people who choose anonymity and spiteful words in order to be deliberately unkind to people they will never meet is, frankly, unprintable). You know that I think: words are real things, with power, in the Universe. But taking care over how I set an idea into words - how to make a daisy chain from phrase, verse and punctuation, in the beautiful phrase of the beautiful song - isn't the same thing as deciding which ideas are permitted to be set down in the first place.
My experience of the NHS suggests the following. That when it works, as it usually does, it is, without doubt, the envy of the world. But what happens when it doesn't work so well? Keith has a big scar on his left leg, the result of being knocked off a motorbike by an ambulance (I know, the irony - it didn't even take him to hospital) (I'll be in trouble if he reads this too). The particular hospital ward he ended up in for two weeks was badly managed, dirty, and full of evidence of patients left unattended and in distress for too long every day. This is not typical, but it is a fact, as was the powerlessness of the patients in that ward, or their families, to enact any change.
Should I wipe my memory clean, and replace it with a #welovethenhs 140-character paean of praise? Was that which I saw to occur, to real human beings, some sort of false consciousness? Have I committed a political crime, by writing this down? Am I forbidden to share our experience of that NHS ward, because to do so is automatically a 'gaffe'? If #welovethenhs is the end of the debate, what, really, is the point of politics?