BECAUSE the minds of all British children are bombarded with corrosive visual advertising material since birth, one cannot expect that the adults they have become, could find a clear grasp of the virtues, ideals or principles discovered by earlier generations.

When Clem Attlee advanced the Collective Ethics of Universal Health Care in 1948, that ‘All shall care for each’, in the NHS, his dream was that eventually, all citizens would take a fierce pride in paying taxes to ensure the health of persons unknown to them, and that society would be bound together by a deep sense of gratitude from those who had received the benefits, towards those perfectly healthy people who had found a worthwhile purpose in their own lives by giving to the care of the sick, in the form of shared taxes.

Citizens who do not experience the reciprocal emotions of pride and of gratitude, are not fully alive.

That is how thoughtful people can distinguish an ethical principle, totally different from the many pragmatic, political and opinionated schemes which others devise.

Principles have the power to inspire a higher level of thinking in millions of unprejudiced people, towards a wiser view of human life, and to change the standards by which civilisations are judged.

Only if you can identify principles, can you detect their influence in history.

It must be obvious to everybody, although we have the valuable institution of the NHS to cure the sick, that Attlee’s dream of uplifting the moral values of British people, is even further from reality than in 1948, because the worship of money, forced upon them by a materialistic media culture, has occupied and dominated the minds and the politics of the population.

NEVILLE WESTERMAN
Cardiff