Clause 1 - Duty on the Secretary of State to promote comprehensive health service based on social solidarity

Part of National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:50 pm on 10 February 2015.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Jacob Rees-Mogg Jacob Rees-Mogg Conservative, North East Somerset 3:50, 10 February 2015

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for a number of points in his intervention. The first is that this social solidarity is the Arthur Scargillisation of legislation. I remember when I was a schoolboy between childhood and adulthood seeing groups shouting, “The miners united will never be defeated”. That is perhaps what they mean by social solidarity—that they want to bring back picket lines and all that went with Mr Arthur Scargill. I see my right hon. Friend’s point.

On my right hon. Friend’s point about clinical necessity, why did I not choose the word “clinical”? The reason is partly pedantry. The word “clinical” strictly means “bedside” and, although I know that it has evolved to mean something more encompassing, a clinical manner is strictly a bedside manner rather than what we have come to think of it meaning. I accept the charge of pedantry, and accept that “clinical” has virtue, because it is slightly wider than “medical”. Nonetheless, I think “medical” covers what we are trying to get at, partly because of the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, who made an inspired point about the concept of flexible certainty. That is to say—to go back to “Mater et Magistra”—that the medical need for the agricultural worker may well be different from the medical need of the office worker. They may have different requirements.