OF leftish persuasion, as most readers know, I keep a sharp eye out for any act of New Labour that can be welcomed as advancing the common good - the litmus test of enlightened social policy.
Such a moment came back in August when it was revealed that the Government intended to ban newly-qualified hospital consultants from private practice for seven years.
As I was happy to point out, this was in the spirit of the founding ideals of the NHS's creator, Nye Bevan, who wanted to abolish private practice altogether. He gave way simply to get the NHS up and running without delay in the hard, yet hopeful, post-war world.
Alan Milburn, the current Health Secretary, was said to believe that private practice should be a reward rather than a right. His view doesn't seem to have changed, for he was said in one newspaper recently to believe that the present rules encourage doctors to allow their waiting lists to grow so they can ask their patients whether they want to be treated privately.
And yet, according to the same report, in The Independent, the proposed ban is to be quietly dropped. Scratching your head? You well might. But of course, while you or I are at the surgery, or in a hospital bed, fierce battles are being fought behind the scenes.
Greeting the original plan with a virtual declaration of war, the consultants have doubtless been digging in. And their battle with the Government is probably mirrored in a battle within Government.
For Tony Blair's advisors are said to want to extend links with private medicine. The price of this is probably dropping the ban on the lucrative private work. And so a canker that has worsened in recent years will continue to sustain a two-tier NHS, with faster treatment for those who pay.
We can guess that Alan Milburn's heart and head have been in the right place. For there's a hint he could be moving on after the General Election, making it easier to abandon a New Labour reform that echoed the best of the Old - action to remove, or at any rate reduce, inequality and unfairness, in an issue most vital to us all.
THAT revolting pub brand name, Tap and Spile, has received a praiseworthy comeuppance. Acting on the wishes of regulars, new owners of the Beverley Tap and Spile, bought from Hartlepool-based Pubmaster, have restored its former name, the Sun Inn. If this inspires other Tap and Spile regulars to demand the old name back - hurrah!
In one or two places the issue goes beyond regulars. The Tap and Spiling of Whitby's Cutty Sark, the first pub seen by visitors alighting from trains and buses, replaced an apt maritime touch with depressing identity-kit sameness.
SHORTLY before Christmas, a TV documentary trawled through the horrors of Naziism, Bosnia/Serbia, and various social experiments that revealed a willingness to be beastly to others, to demonstrate that evil can grip ordinary, decent folk, like you and me. Walter de la Mare, seemingly the gentlest and most dreamy of poets, made the same point with admirable candour: "Engrossed in the day's 'news', I read, Of all in man that's vile and base; Horrors confounding heart and head - massacre, murder, filth, disgrace: Then paused, and thought did inward tend - on my own past and self to dwell. Whereat some inmate muttered: 'Friend, If you and I plain truth must tell, EVERYTHING human we comprehend, Only too well, too well'."
Acknowledging this truth is our soundest protection to confine the beast within us. Happy New Year.
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