From the letters page of the Guardian, 20.8.10, Robin Wendt wrote;
"One basic strand runs through the Con-Dems policy. It is the swift repudiation of the post-war social settlement and an unrelenting march back to the 1930s,...
The promised cuts in public services are on a scale of which Stanley Baldwin would have been proud. They will reduce the public sector to much of what it was in his time - crude basic provision for the worst off. The changes to health services means the wholesale dismantling of Bevan's 1948 comprehensive, equitable and publicly accountable NHS. In the 1940s the Conservatives tried to oppose the creation of the NHS; now they have succeeded. It will be replaced by an atomised system of private commissioning, though the GPs and private firms brought in to support them; and delivery through hospitals that are no longer publicly owned. NHS privatisation is not just a prospect. It is here now.
Likewise the introduction of free schools and academies, entailing as they do the effective abolition of LEAs and any semblance of fair admission policies, are a huge rebuttal of Butler's 1945 Education Act and its even distribution of power between government and localities. It will be replaced by a centralised system. The proposed cuts in social security benefits will undermine the "cradle to the grave" philosophy so eloquently expounded in the 1940s by Beveridge and built into postwar legislation."
