Protester who accused the health secretary of trying to privatise the NHS represents a big, angry public, saying 'that's enough'
It's never easy to make out what it means for a politician to have an adverse encounter with a member of the public. If you're Gordon Brown, it doesn't matter what the issue is, your own personality is enough to make everyone side with the civilian. But the guy who was punched by John Prescott? I can't remember anything about him, except that he had an egg.
So what does June Hautot mean for Andrew Lansley? The 75-year-old encountered the health secretary on Tuesday. She didn't get time to say a huge amount to him: just enough to accuse him of trying to privatise the NHS, and say that he'd wanted to since 1979 (he lifted his eyebrow at this, as if to say "but I was only 12!". In fact, he was working for Norman Tebbit under Thatcher, so the claim isn't totally reasonable – Tebbit was never health secretary – but nor is it wild). The hallway of her house in Tooting, south-west London, where she's lived all her life, is full of flowers.
On the way to the T-shirt printers (she's going to get some made for another march – I don't know what the slogan will be, but I do know they'll have Lansley's face on them), someone asks her for her autograph.
She distilled, in that one moment with Lansley, this powerful outcry: not the courteously disapproving interventions of the royal colleges nor the technical, meticulous opposition of the House of Lords, but rather, a big, angry public saying "that's enough."
The economist Julian Le Grand wrote a slightly dispiriting piece about "intuitivists versus empiricists" in the NHS situation, in which he suggested that rational debate was being crowded out by people who just had a gut reaction against seeing the NHS privatised. I think Hautot would certainly class herself as one of those people, and I class myself as one, also – but the gut-reaction here isn't so much a rejection of the evidence on competition in the health marketplace. It's a rejection of a political system in which you can vote for someone who explicitly promises one thing and then does its opposite.
Hautot is keen to stress that she's not some protest blow-in – "Go and look in my toilet!" she says, which I do, and it's covered with lacquered posters from pretty well every demonstration in south-west London's living memory. She protested against the closure of St James's in Balham (1980), and St Benedicts in Tooting (1981). She was there when they wrecked the Women's Hospital in Clapham South. These Tories, she says, are no different from the last Tories. "They were slower on the NHS before, because they knew how everyone felt about it. But they closed five hospitals, just in this borough. They never wanted the NHS, because look, that's the beginning of socialism, an NHS. All helping one another, all equal. They don't want you equal."
Her objections to Lansley's bill are not about the finer points of PFI, or cherry-picking under "any-willing-provider", or the way commissioning will redound practically upon what a GP's job actually amounts to: rather, she iterates the principles under which the NHS was founded.
That people shouldn't profit from other people's misfortune. "It takes the pride out of people's work, that's what's happening to nurses. If you read the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, it's exactly the same – don't wash down, water the paint. Get everything cheaper. It takes the pride out of it."
One of not many people old enough to be able to remember illness at close range before the NHS, June Hautot lost her mother when she was a child. "My father didn't know she was dying, she was just ill. He didn't get sick pay; he was going to work to pay the five shillings for the doctor to come in the door. That was before he'd even looked at you. And the rent was 12 shillings (60p).
"Put it this way, when you were a parent then, you'd just think, I can't be ill, I've got to save it for the kids. So you'd end up deteriorating. People have been born into the NHS, and they feel safe. They think, 'My housing might be bad, I might be unemployed, but at least I know that I'll be looked after'. And the day will come when they won't be."
Lansley would probably say this was overstating it a bit. He doesn't want to end the practice of medicine altogether, only put a stop to this archaic business where you could expect equal treatment regardless of your wealth. Unfortunately, that's the thing people like most about the NHS. The danger of June Hautot is that she's the sharp tip of an extremely big iceberg.