Labour didn't need Scotland to create the NHS

As Labour continue to shout that they are the only party that can save the NHS and Jim Murphy uses the history of the formation of the NHS to encourage us to vote Labour, I remembered the Wings over Scotland article that showed Scotland's contribution to Westminster majorities was minimal and I found myself asking the question: did Labour need Scotland's votes in order to form the NHS?

First of all, here is what Jim Murphy has been saying at the launch of the Scottish Labour manifesto, taken from this STV News article:

"Nationalism did not create the NHS or a welfare state. Nationalism did not establish the rights of working people. Nationalism did not transform the housing conditions of Scotland's cities. All of that was done by Labour governments and, more often than not, it was opposed by the Scottish nationalists who now seek to steal these clothes."

Suggesting the SNP opposed the NHS is a big claim. He then uses the history of the NHS to urge Scots to vote Labour because:

"Nye Bevan, Labour’s creator of the NHS speaks to us through history to tell us that the NHS will survive as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it. The NHS is an article of our political faith. We will always fight for it." 

But just how crucial a contribution did Scotland's Labour MPs make to the formation of the NHS? Let's look at the first election after the ending of the second world war to find out.

The post-war general election was held on 5th July 1945 and returned Clement Attlee's Labour government in a shock to Winston Churchill's war-winning Conservatives. Labour's social reform policies were deemed to be the deciding factor.

Image from Wikipedia

Back then, there were 640 seats in the House of Commons and thus a party needed 321 seats to form a majority. Labour beat that target easily, winning 393 seats across the UK. In Scotland, Labour took 37 of the 71 seats then available; the Independent Labour Party took 3 of the seats but defected to Labour in 1947, thus bringing Scottish Labour's total seats to 40.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that removing Scotland's 40 seats from Labour's UK-wide total of 393 still gives Labour a majority in the House of Commons. The arithmetic is 393-40=353; majority is simply that number minus half the seats in the Commons, i.e. 353-320=33.

Thus, without Scottish Labour, UK Labour would still have commanded an overall majority of 33 MPs in the House of Commons and thus would still have introduced the NHS. Their closest rivals, the Conservatives, won 197 seats in the 1945 election and, without the Scottish Labour seats, the Conservatives were still 156 seats short of Labour; even if those 40 Scottish Labour seats had been won by the Conservatives, it'd still leave them 116 seats behind Labour.

A key part of Jim Murphy's message is that "more often than not, it was opposed by the Scottish nationalists" but how many MPs did the SNP win in 1945? If you listen to Jim Murphy, you'd be left believing there were SNP MPs back in 1945 and that they bitterly opposed the creation of the NHS. But although the SNP fielded candidates in that election, they didn't win a single one. So there were zero SNP MPs in the House of Commons back then and thus no SNP voice to oppose the creation of the NHS.

It's also interesting to note that the concept of the modern welfare state, of which the NHS is a part, was first put forward in the 1942 Beveridge Report and, according to Wikipedia, was supported by the Liberal and Conservative parties, as well as the Labour party. Indeed, Beveridge himself was a member of the Liberal party.

William Beveridge

So Jim Murphy's call that only by voting Scottish Labour can we save the NHS is just as false as the claims he made during the independence referendum. All three major post-war parties supported the Beveridge report and its implementation would have happened whether Scotland existed or not.