From the archives: The birth of the NHS

File this double shot from the Spectator archives in the folder marked ‘For historical interest’. Our leading article on the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, and an essay by Lord Moran from one week after:

Health and security, The Spectator, 2 July, 1948

July 5th, 1948, will be a notable date in British social history, marking as it does the entry into operation of the National Health Service and the National Insurance Acts. The latter removes from the whole of the population the fear of want, even though many will still be left in circumstances so straitened that the National Assistance Board, created to meet special cases in which the statutory National Insurance benefits are plainly insufficient, will have plenty of scope for its valuable and necessary activity. But the new National Insurance Act represents, after all, only an extension and rationalisation of a system with which the nation has been familiar for nearly forty years.