Life insurance and HIV antibody testing.

overhaul of social services ever undertaken in Britain. Contrasting with the well recollected fiasco after the first world war, the welfare state set up by the Labour government represented faithful realisation of the aspirations of the movement for social reconstruction. The postwar system proved durable and was supported by a broad consensus. It remained intact until the later years of the Thatcher administration. Before 1987 only minor incursions against the Beveridge edifice were attempted.8 Since then, however, the Conservative government has embarked on its own programme of reconstruction, approaching its task very differently from its wartime predecessors and proclaiming a philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with reports of both the Medical Planning Commission and Beveridge. Now Beveridge is blamed for having wrecked the national economy by plunging the state into unnecessary and wasteful intervention in welfare. He is held responsible for having engineered a system for "guzzling taxes which might have gone into productive investment and spewing them out again indiscriminately into the poor and the prosperous."9 Inevitably, critics identify the prime culprit of this "monstrous system" as the NHS, with its seemingly inexhaustible appetite for public funds and its provision of service regardless of means. Given this undercurrent of destructive criticism, the present government cannot be surprised at the lack of public confidence in its health policies. Regardless of repeated assertions to the contrary, so called reforms will inevitably be taken as the prelude to wholesale retreat from the spirit of Beveridge. Perhaps, if the present administration wants to distance itself from the more strident forms of Thatcherism and convince the public of its genuine support for the NHS as it was originally conceived, no better opportunity could be provided than the anniversary of the Beveridge report. Otherwise, the public and those working in the NHS will continue to fear that preparations are being made to turn back the clock to the prewar system so effectively discredited by the Medical Planning Council in 1942. CHARLES WEBSTER Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford OXI 4AL