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HERO health warrior Harry Smith moved Labour conference to tears yesterday with a warning that Britain risks returning to its “bleak” past if the NHS is privatised.
The 91-year-old described how his sister died in a workhouse hospital and recalled the screams of a neighbour dying from cancer without morphine.
“It was a bleak time and an uncivilised time because public healthcare didn’t exist,” he told the conference.
“My parents did everything in their power to keep my sister Marian alive and comfortable but they just didn’t have the dosh to get her the best clinics, find her the best doctors or the right medicine.
“Sadly my family’s story isn’t unique.”
Mr Smith remembered his pride yesterday at helping to elect Clement Attlee’s visionary Labour government in 1945.
“Election day 1945 was one of the proudest days in my life — finally getting a chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar. That is why I voted Labour and for the creation of the NHS.”
And he told party activists: “We must never ever let the NHS free from our grasp, becaue if we do, your future will be my past.”
His heartrending speech was too much for many delegates who broke into tears before giving Mr Smith the longest and loudest standing ovation of the week.
Shadow health minister Andy Burnham said the next general election with be the Con-Dem’s “day of reckoning on the NHS.”
Conjuring the same spirit of ’45, he pledged to “complete Nye Bevan’s vision and bring social care into the NHS.”
Labour’s most popular shadow minister said he made it his “mission” to end Britain’s social care scandal after witnessing his grandmother mistreatment.
Other members gave their own motivation for fighting for the future of the NHS.
Sutton and Cheam candidate Emily Brothers, who is blind, remembered how she spent a lot of time having treatment for cataracts at Alder Hey hospital as a child.
“Even at that early age I understood the NHS was on my side,” she said.
Erewash candidate Catherine Atkinson (right) brought her baby son Jacob on stage and said: “The NHS is on loan, not from the last generation but from the next.
“It’s on loan from Jacob and we have to preserve it.”
