It is hard to imagine in the light of the current government's swaggering arrogance and wretched incompetence but there was a golden era when Conservatives transformed public health. The lynchpin was a Health Minister who actually knew what he was talking about.
Walter Elliot trained as a medical doctor at Glasgow University as did John Boyd Orr. The two struck up a lifelong friendship. Boyd Orr was the first director of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, which built up an international reputation in the emerging science of animal and human nutrition. As he started taking an interest in politics, Elliot, with Boyd Orr's encouragement, also continued his studies in physiology and nutrition – his thesis earned him a doctorate of science in 1923.
Boyd Orr described himself as a conservative (with a small c). Elliot was duly elected to parliament and published a history of the Conservative Party.
Elliot became a rising star – holding junior posts in Scotland then Scottish Secretary, and UK minister first for agriculture and finally health in 1938.
Party political affiliations then were not as important as later, when Margaret Thatcher earned the label 'milk snatcher' for ending free school milk in the 1970s.
But it was Elliot in 1927 who introduced free or cheap milk for school children in Scotland, via a private member's bill which gained support from other parties. It was later extended to England. The rationale was that milk provided much-needed basic nutrition, particularly for poorer kids who needed it most. It also stopped milk being poured down the drain when prices plummeted in times of agricultural crisis.
The Rowett Institute conducted detailed surveys of what people of all classes actually had to eat. This resulted in a report called
Food Nutrition and Health in 1936. It triggered a wave of outrage – waking people up to the fact that malnutrition was rife in Britain – one third of the population did not have enough money for an adequate diet. Better-nourished public-school boys were inches taller than their state-educated peers.
Various attempts were made to nobble Boyd Orr and keep the report quiet, but he had briefed his friend Ritchie Calder and other journalists in advance.
Boyd Orr sought a publisher and was invited to meet the chairman of Macmillan who was pleased to take it on. This was Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister. He had been shocked by the abject poverty in Stockton, as Elliot and Boyd Orr were by what they had witnessed in the slums of Glasgow.
The advent of war put everything into sharp focus. A newly-created Ministry of Food needed help and Boyd Orr obliged. Churchill's coalition government brought in non-party experts and successful businessmen like Frederick Marquis – Lord Woolton. As a young social worker in Liverpool, he was horrified to learn that a kindly woman who lived next door had died from starvation. He ran a hostel and social centre for poor people in the docklands and was warden of Liverpool University Settlement.
Woolton's rationing scheme was the first ever to be based on the nutritional needs of the people, with priority for mothers and children. People could also choose how to spend their coupons.
As Boyd Orr observed: 'If an occasional cargo of oranges came in, every child in the slums got his orange before a millionaire could get one. The rich people got less to eat, which did them no harm and the poor, so far as the supply would allow, got a diet adequate for health, with free orange juice, cod-liver oil, extra milk and other things for mothers and children'.
The American Public Health Association described it as one of the greatest demonstrations in public health administration the world had ever seen. Normal politics resumed at the end of the war in 1945, and the new Labour Government enshrined the prevailing spirit of equality, creating the National Health Service in 1948 which brought free care to everyone.
Woolton joined the Conservatives. Within a year, he was appointed party chairman helping the Tories return to power in 1951. Boyd Orr was appointed director general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation and awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1949.
At the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, ministers were keen to evoke the wartime spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz. Three years later and there is hardly a squeak – the UK death toll from the virus now tops 230,000 – more than three times the total civilian deaths from enemy bombing in the entire war.
It is difficult to imagine a more hapless crew than Boris Johnson's cabinet – arrogant yet ignorant. Nearly half of them studied PPE at Oxford University yet they were completely clueless about real-life PPE when it came to ordering personal protective equipment for NHS workers.
Politics has been redefined where life experience means working as a policy wonk or at a merchant bank. The ability to swallow and parrot party lines is far more important than acquiring practical knowledge of how ordinary people live and work. The UK Covid inquiry has been told of reductions in public health staff, poor planning for an epidemic and unshakeable faith in the private sector to sort things out.
In the event, fast delivery of an effective vaccination saved the day – itself resulting from sustained public investment in facilities to identify and respond to new viral threats.
Then came all the lies and deceit. As millions tuned out to applaud NHS staff, the Health Secretary was having an extra-marital affair in his office – for which some wished him the clap he so richly deserved.
The contrast with Conservatives now and their forbears 80 years ago could not be starker. They cared about the poorest in society and did something about it. It seems that the current crop, viewing the spectacular growth of food banks as nothing to do with them, only care about themselves.
Chris Holme is a former Herald
reporter and Reuters Foundation fellow in medical journalism. He now runs the History Company
