There was understandable anxiety among the profession that their business model, and the comfortable lifestyles it enabled, would be under threat from being forced into the employ of the public sector.
So how did Bevan deal with this opposition from the very people we would have expected him to be able to count on for support? Well, Mr Hunt, pay attention. First, Bevan recognised he couldn’t run his new, ‘utopian’ vision without the support of the staff that were to make it up. Without doctors, consultants, nurses and surgeons there could be no NHS. Bevan recognised the 1944 White Paper ‘A National Health Service’ had been supported across the House, and, according to the results of a questionnaire issued by the BMA, the majority of doctors.
Thus, it wasn’t the principle of nationalised healthcare which was objected to, but the implementation.