It is strange, then, to remember that it is Starmer, not his furious critics, who is keeping with Labour’s traditional positioning on Israel. Labour had been the political home for British Jews since the first Labour MPs in 1905 voted against the Conservative government’s efforts to restrict Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. And Labour called for a Jewish state even before the Balfour Declaration. The party’s 1917 War Aims Memorandum called for “a free state, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return”. The statement was endorsed by Labour Party conference, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the National Executive Committee.

Over the next three decades, 11 Labour Party conferences voted to affirm support for a Jewish national home in Palestine before the state of Israel was finally established in 1948. And Labour MPs regularly defended the idea of a Jewish state in public. The former coal miner Tom Williams, who would serve in Attlee’s Cabinet, told the House of Commons in 1938: “When a national home was promised to the Jews, I presume it was not intended to be a home of shifting sands, a home under canvas that could be blown away by any and every large gust of wind… It was to be a home really worthy of a great people.” In a complete reversal of the current political landscape, Labour was confronting a pervasive scepticism towards the Jewish cause that existed on the Right of British politics.

The Conservative governments of the interwar period had become increasingly opposed to Jewish immigration to what is now Israel during the British management of the region, which began in 1919 under a mandate from the League of Nations. In 1939, the Conservative Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald announced that the UK government would cap the number of Jewish migrants at 1,500 per month, with Jewish rights to land ownership also severely restricted. Labour MPs erupted in horror at the proposal. As Left-wingers Michael Foot and Dick Crossman argued: “To limit Jewish immigration just at the moment when Palestine was the sole available refuge from Hitler would be a crime against humanity.” Philip Noel-Baker, a Labour MP who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced the immigration caps as unworkable and immoral, adding that Conservative opposition to a Jewish state “will fail because in the most tragic hour of Jewish history, the British people will not deny them their Promised Land”.

After coming to power in 1945, however, the new Labour government was similarly reluctant to remove immigration controls immediately. As Prime Minister, Attlee was concerned about the backlash from Muslims, especially in India, the independence of which was a key foreign policy priority. With US President Harry Truman, he agreed to an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to decide the next steps. When it reported in May 1946, the committee recommended ending restrictions on Jewish migration and proposed that 100,000 Jews be allowed into Palestine immediately. Attlee’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed the recommendations, saying Americans supported the report because they didn’t want “to have too many of them [Jews] in New York”. This notorious comment would lead to Bevin being pelted with eggs and tomatoes by activists when he visited New York.

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Bevin has gained a posthumous reputation for antisemitism, but his biographers are insistent that his reluctance to support the creation of Israel had more to do with what Tony Benn would later call “the traditional anti-Israel bias in the Foreign Office” rather than hatred of Jews. In keeping with the broader attitude of the Left, as a trade union leader Bevin had championed Jewish organised labour, including those in Palestine. In 1936, he even told the TUC conference: “It seems to me that the new star of Bethlehem now shining over Jerusalem is the star of socialism… We must give these people [Jews] the opportunity of developing socialism… extending to them our blessing and helping them to build a new Jerusalem in Palestine.” Bevin’s later scepticism seems a reflection of the broader opinion of the British elite and Foreign Office, which for decades was pro-Arab.

And from the perspective of realpolitik, support for the Arabs made more sense for Britain, with Zionism seeming the Romantic, utopian cause. Britain’s main interests in the Middle East were tied to oil and trade routes that were controlled by Arab nations and, in a Cold War context, there was little to be gained from offending the Arabs and pushing them closer towards the Soviet Union. The two figures who best personified this division in the British political elite were Michael Foot and his brother Hugh, a distinguished career diplomat. Michael made his first visit to Palestine in 1934 to visit his brother, who was serving there in the British Colonial Service, and witnessed his reactionary sentiments first-hand. Hugh, like most of the Colonial Service, sympathised with the Arabs so much that the Palestinian flag was draped over his coffin at his funeral in 1990.

Michael, on the other hand, took up the cause for a Jewish homeland. As editor of Tribune, he employed staunch Zionists, including Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson, and Tosco Fyvel. In response to Bevin’s intransigence in 1946, he and Richard Crossman composed a pamphlet called A Palestine Munich? which argued that Labour was at risk of adopting a policy of appeasement, as the Conservatives had done, which would again abandon the Jews for the sake of geopolitics. They insisted that “survivors of Hitler’s gas chambers now herded into the displaced persons’ centres should be permitted to join their friends and relatives in the National Home”. They were referring to the unprecedented displacement of Jewish refugees in Europe following the Holocaust, which was compounded by increasing Arab animosity to Jews in the Middle East, with thousands forced to flee their homes in Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere.

For the immediate post-war decades, it was Michael Foot’s idealism which won out. And Zionism was not just associated with the Labour Party but with the most radical wing of the Labour Left. Nye Bevan, perhaps its most celebrated figure, wrote as poetically as anyone of the cause for a Jewish homeland following a visit in 1954:

“When… the Arab says the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so.”

Tony Benn expressed similar emotions. He had been at the Sha’ar HaGolam kibbutz by the Golan Heights on VE Day when he was serving in the RAF. And he would return in 1956 for Israeli Independence Day, writing in his diary that he was doubly amazed by the social and economic progress of the Israelis because “underneath it all was the tragedy of 6 million dead in the gas chambers and the miracle of a home for Jews after 1,900 years of pogrom and ghetto”. Benn was a greater admirer of the Jewish socialist movement and concluded that “perhaps the kibbutzim have the answer — stay rooted to the soil and pass it on more richly fertile than before to your sons and grandsons”. This was representative of many on the Left who regarded Israel as a great socialist experiment, sowing the desert with the seeds of a genuine egalitarianism.

Such proud and conscious identification with the Israeli state is very rare on the Left today. And the roots of its modern position date to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. The New Left, the strain of identitarian socialist politics then emerging across the West, took the view that Israelis had come not as refugees but as conquerors, anticipating the contemporary framing of the country as a “settler colony”. But the PLP was still decidedly Zionist. In the Sixties and Seventies, over 10% of Labour MPs were Jews; in 1966, 38 Jews were elected as Labour MPs, compared to five in 2019.

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This remained the dominant attitude at the top of the party. During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Harold Wilson wanted to impose a three-line whip on a motion demanding the Conservative government send arms to Israel. Roy Jenkins, Wilson’s erstwhile deputy who had resigned to support joining the European Economic Community, cautioned that it was a bad idea. The Labour leader shot him down: “Look, Roy, I’ve accommodated your fucking conscience for years. Now you’re going to have to take account of mine.” Wilson explained to Jenkins that he cared just as much about Israel as Jenkins did Europe.

Wilson’s leadership, however, was the high point of Labour Zionism. Although the party has retained a sturdy pro-Israel flank, the breadth and depth of the Labour Party’s commitment to Israel has waned in recent decades, while the New Left’s interpretation of Israel has grown in strength. There are multifarious reasons for this: the severity of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (until 2005); the hardline governments of Sharon and Netanyahu; the fading of Jewish influence within Labour and the rise of a Muslim-Labour constituency; and the successful advocacy of groups like the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Among activists, an ambient anti-Israel attitude has become gradually predominant, as the scenes in London over the past three weekends have demonstrated. Israel is now regarded as a powerful and authoritarian military state rather than a refuge for a victimised people. The result is a fascinating sea change in political allegiances. Today, Labour’s historic Zionist instincts have faded. The group which had been so long championed by the British Right — Arabs in Palestine — have become the primary concern of the British Left. Even if Starmer’s beliefs on Israel are as strongly-held as Harold Wilson’s, it seems unlikely he can win his party round to the same position.

“Our NHS” looms so large in our politics as to wholly justify the sardonic description of Britain as “a health service with a country attached”. And while this outsize place in the national consciousness is sometimes mocked and often puzzling, it was inevitable from its very birth. For the origin-story of the NHS contains, in germinal form, a great deal of what makes up quintessentially modern Britain. Its formation was first demanded by, and in turn helped to catalyse, what conservatives now call the “Blob”: that unaccountable ecosystem of agencies, largely state-funded and amorphously affiliated, that replaced more voluntaristic forms of civil society. It was powered by the cultural shift toward centralisation and managerialism that blossomed during the Second World War and that’s still with us today.

Crucially, baked into the origin-story of Our NHS is modern Britain’s defining feature: a desire to have our cake and eat it. This desire, by no means unique to former PM Boris Johnson, finds complicated expression in the NHS: in the global standing supposedly conferred on Britain by this institution, the opportunity it offers to display national magnanimity — and also in what its foundation and upkeep cost us in real, geopolitical hard power.

If you were to take at face value the omnipresent warnings about Tory eagerness to “dismantle the NHS”, you would think there was no healthcare at all prior to Bevan. But pre-war British health provision was a long way from non-existent — it was just decentralised. Provision was split between three main groups: voluntary hospitals, “Poor Law” institutions and local authorities.

In 1938, some 33% of hospital beds were in voluntary hospitals: a mix of charitable foundations, such as Guy’s in London and Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, and provincial “cottage hospitals” usually run by GPs and funded by charity donations and subscription societies. Another 20% of beds in 1938 were in “Poor Law” institutions, which originated in the spartan 19th-century workhouse system, immortalised in Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Many such institutions began as workhouse infirmaries and provided most of the beds for long-term inpatients, such as the very old or chronically ill. And the remainder of hospitals, some 47%, were run by local authorities, who were responsible for maternity, dental, school health and child welfare services, sanatoria and mental hospitals. Funding for this mix was collected via some local authority taxation, supplemented by churches, charities, private subscription and mutual societies — light state intervention supplemented by charitable giving and mutual aid, and supported by civil society voluntarism and mutual support.

Enter the Blob. Even before the Second World War, a germinal Blob already existed as an emerging force in British public life, typified by the Political and Economic Planning think tank. This strikingly proto-Blairite vehicle in funding, demographics and sensibility was crewed by just the kind of figures that make up the modern chumocracy, including financiers, social reformers and company directors. It was funded by big business and already had its eye on health, calling for British provision to be transformed so as to be centred on individuals rather than institutions.

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This blend of financial interests, technocracy and do-gooding has been hacking away at the eccentric pre-existing thickets of organic civil society for decades now, with tacit or overt state support. But perhaps the single most salient moment in its formalisation as a serious force in British public life was the Second World War. During these six years of emergency collectivism, any meaningful barrier between private, voluntarist and state effort collapsed into a single national war effort; and nowhere were its results more pronounced than in British healthcare. By 1938, Britain was expecting a war and, in preparation, the Ministry of Health formed a regionalised Emergency Hospital Service to coordinate care for injured servicepeople and air-raid victims. It took some months of negotiation to persuade the voluntary hospitals to participate. But once their assent was secured, all worked together during the war.

And this Emergency Health Service, in turn, laid the managerial foundations for the National Health Service, for example by centralising data-gathering, performance standards and pay scales. And in the aftermath of war, Attlee’s Labour government seized the opportunity provided by those foundations. For as medical historian Nick Hayes shows, even before the war, Left-wing activists disliked the hodgepodge of charities and contributory schemes which funded healthcare schemes for the working class. Aneurin Bevan even denounced the “indignity” of nurses collecting money for charitable hospitals.

In 1945, a Labour government, including Bevan, took Parliament in a landslide. The party’s manifesto promised to revolutionise British healthcare. No more subscriptions or tin-rattling: instead, care would be free at the point of use, universal, available based on need and paid for out of general taxation. To watch the doctor-activists today, you might think they had all always been in favour. But at the time, there was stiff resistance. Voluntary hospitals defended their local links, while doctors objected to being paid a salary by the state. Some, like my grandparents (both doctors), emigrated instead of joining the new service. Many only agreed to work in the new system, when Bevan, as Health Secretary, conceded that consultants could see private as well as NHS patients. Similarly, the still-extant status of GP surgeries as private businesses contracted by the NHS was originally a Bevan compromise.

He is reported to have said of these objectors that he “stuffed their mouths with gold”. But with Britain impoverished by the war effort, where did he get the gold? And this is the final piece in the untold story of how our NHS made post-war Britain. For the compromises Bevan made to create the new Britain also played a central part in unmaking the Britain that was there before. Attlee’s government took power with grand plans to create a new welfare state for British citizens. To fund it, Attlee asked for a loan from the United States — only to find US President Harry Truman used that request as an opportunity to force concessions on the British presence and power in the Middle East, and with it any British ability to profit from the region’s oil wells.

Bevan felt obliged to downplay British interests in the Middle East in 1947, as historian James Barr shows, in part to ensure enough American goodwill to secure the $3.75 billion loan (around $63 billion in today’s currency) Labour needed to found its promised welfare state. Nor would this be the last time that, as Barr puts it, “Empire would be sacrificed for welfare”. In 1964, with a majority of only four seats, Harold Wilson cut defence spending by 16% in favour of welfare — a move that eventually resulted in British withdrawal from projecting hard power “East of Suez”. In effect, Attlee’s government began a long post-war trajectory of selling off Britain’s surviving geopolitical reach, piece by piece. In exchange, Bevan got a health service Britain couldn’t afford even when it was founded.

So let’s both have, and eat, another slice of 75th birthday cake. Our NHS has always been powered by cakeism. By the hope we could have services regulated, funded and managed nationally but somehow still locally connected. That we could have consultants willing to participate in a relatively low-paying national system, in exchange for the freedom to work privately, too. That we could, somehow, continue to “punch above our weight” internationally and also domestically, trading away the meaningful geopolitical foundations of Britain’s one-time international reach in exchange for the money to create state-run healthcare provision at levels well above what we can sustainably support.

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In this sense, the NHS really is a miracle. It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet somehow we’ve kept this extraordinary experiment in post-war collectivism on life support for 75 years, while keeping up appearances (at least among ourselves) of still being a grand power “on the international stage”. We achieved this by slowly cannibalising what was left of Britain’s pre-war international reach. And with this now exhausted, we’ve resorted to inverting that foreign adventurism, and inviting our own reverse colonisation by anyone who wants to move to Britain and make the economy look like it’s still growing (and/or make the NHS look like it’s still functioning). Nor is there any way out of this policy bind, either on the Left or the Right: Britain really doesn’t train enough healthcare workers, and we really are dependent on immigration for growth, and on growth to fund the NHS.

I’m agnostic on whether we’d be better off keeping nationalised healthcare as opposed to some other funding model. But at the national level, the popularity of NHS cakeism is such that very little is likely to change, until change can’t be avoided. Notwithstanding Left-wing doomers, the only way the NHS will ever be “dismantled” will be as the logical endpoint of measures taken to keep it alive. That is, when the ongoing (and partly NHS-driven) transformation of our citizenry has so diluted the memory of the wartime social solidarity that inspired its birth, that we no longer have the political will to keep the patient alive.

That’s not to say elitism wasn’t a problem back then. Working-class people, if they appeared at all in books, films or plays in the early fifties, were — as Listener magazine said in its review of Honey — “comic or loyal, or more frequently both”. But by 1958 that situation had slowly started to change. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, staged at London’s Royal Court in 1956, was the ripple that quickly turned into a “new wave” of stories about a restless generation of young working-class upstarts.

In the era of the post-war welfare state, journalists were also giving working-class life more attention. In 1957, Michael Young and Peter Wilmott published a study of life in the modern East End, Family and Kinship in East London. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, issued the same year, was based on his own working-class upbringing in Hunslet, Leeds. Both books became surprise bestsellers. Their authors were driven by a belief that working-class people possessed a rich culture, and by their concern that the communities from which that culture sprang were threatened by the well-meant intentions of post-war politicians — in particular the replacement of inner-city streets with out-of-town council estates.

But on the whole working-class people’s prospects were looking up. This was the era of a brand-new welfare state and near-full employment. Free secondary education meant Shelagh, who died exactly ten years ago, was the first person in her family to remain at school beyond the age of 14. In 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, claimed that the British people “had never had it so good”. There were more (though still very few) chances for working-class people to have their voices heard.

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A modicum of economic security and the political rhetoric of opportunity were the foundations on which Shelagh constructed her youthful dreams for a life different from her mother’s. She wanted fame and fortune — but failing that, she wanted and believed she could create a life focused on creative endeavour. She had no deference, no sense that the arts were not for the likes of her; the state told her she was worthy of education and investment.

Still, she was unsentimental about the welfare state, and even more so about the working-class community that Richard Hoggart lovingly described. Her debut focuses on Jo, a working-class teenager who lives in Salford with her single mother, Helen, and who becomes a single mother herself after a brief affair with a black sailor. As the pair barged onstage, carrying suitcases as they “flitted” from one rented room to another, they ripped through any romanticism about working-class life.

“What’s wrong with this place?” asks Helen ironically, as she and Jo survey their new home, a bare flat in a Manchester lodging house. She answers her own question: “Everything in it is falling apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating — but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary. What more do you want?” In the fifties — a “selfish decade,” argued the Labour politician and architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan — “community” was too often a euphemism for overcrowded homes and enduring poverty.

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Shelagh knew that women in Salford were lucky if they got modern décor and good neighbours; that wasn’t, she suggested, enough. She was the first post-war playwright to suggest that women had minds and desires of their own: a radical proposal in the fifties. The anti-heroes of the so-called “kitchen sink” novels and plays that pre-dated Honey — Joe Lampton in John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957), or Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) — were all men.

Meanwhile, advertisers, educators, policymakers and psychologists told women that they were luckier than their mothers. Clad in New Look dresses, they could spend their lives making happy homes for their hard-working husbands and their healthy children — the citizens of Britain’s brave new future. But Honey showed that this life was beyond the means of thousands of women who, like Jo and Helen, continued to live in overcrowded slums.

Even more radically, Delaney suggested this was a life that women did not want. In Honey, Jo finds solace in her friendship with Geoff, a gay art student, who is keen to make a home for her and the baby. He voices the standard medical opinion of the time: “Motherhood is supposed to come natural to women.” Pregnancy was meant to render women docile, maternity to fulfil an innate femininity. But Jo rages against her fate. “My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it,” she says. “I’m an extraordinary person. There’s only one of me like there’s only one of you.”

More than a decade before the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in Britain, Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. In the novels and plays written by male authors of the 1950s, women hold back ambitious young men. But in Honey, the male characters are keener on marriage and domesticity than Jo or Helen. The woman want love — but they want some freedom too. They know that the comforts men associate with domestic bliss are the result of women’s hard work. They refuse to be compliant; “we enjoy it!” Helen responds scornfully when Geoff tells her off for rowing with Jo. Resentment and anger at their shared dependency, the fallibility of their bodies, and their lack of choices are riven through their relationship; but from that shared experience also springs love.

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A Taste of Honey was championed by Joan Littlewood, who, with fellow communist Ewan MacColl, had established Theatre Workshop in Manchester in the 1930s. But Delaney’s assertion that working-class life wasn’t all affluence and happy housewives caused a furore. There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection. The official charged with reading it called the play “muck” and proposed banning it. “I think it’s revolting, quite apart from the homosexual bits,” he wrote. “To me it has no saving grace whatsoever. If we pass muck like this it does give our critics something to go on.”

“After some misgivings,” his office grudgingly passed Honey, but only “because it depicts such a sad collection of undesirables it will not do the public any harm.”

A Taste of Honey premiered at Theatre Workshop on 27 May 1958. Almost all the press dismissed the play as a flop, its content vulgar and its author untutored. The Spectator declared that Honey’s only redeeming feature was that “it is not scholarly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez, but the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal”. Most of the Right-wing press was more damning. “Once, authors wrote good plays set in drawing-rooms. Now, under the Welfare State, they write bad plays set in garrets,” sneered the Daily Mail. The depiction of women incensed many journalists. The Salford Reporter, in Delaney’s hometown, oscillated between denying the existence of single mothers and slums, and asserting that, even if they did exist, this “sordid tale of a prostitute’s daughter” certainly wasn’t suitable theatrical fare.

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But theatregoers from working-class Stratford did not agree. Builders, labourers and office workers told a BBC news crew that Honey was “about people like us, isn’t it? Real life”. And Shelagh’s appeal crossed class boundaries. Carol Dix and her friends were 13-year-old middle-class grammar schoolgirls in the Midlands when Honey was staged. They’d never have been allowed to see the play, but they were preoccupied with its author: “The women’s life-style we noticed, and wanted to copy, were bohemians like Sheelagh [sic] Delaney,’ they later recalled in a collective memoir.

Her youth and notoriety meant Shelagh regularly appeared in the press and on television throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. She liked to dress comfortably, attending interviews wearing, as the Daily Mail told its readers, fisherman’s sweaters and “paint spattered jeans” — very unlike the glamorous Hollywood icons of the cinema, or the lipsticked housewives of women’s magazines. This made her an icon for those girls who wanted more from the world than a wedding dress, but weren’t sure what, or how to get it. Some of them went on to create the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.

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Meanwhile Honey became a box office hit, transferred to London’s West End in 1959, and enjoyed a Broadway run in 1960. It has been performed across the world ever since. In 2019, the play enjoyed a successful revival as a National Theatre touring production, sadly cut short by Covid. That the performances, including the premier in Salford, were sell-out shows that Honey still resonates today. We’re back in a world where government rhetoric is often at odds with the harsh reality of poverty, and women struggle to care for the vulnerable without proper material support.

But Honey speaks to a wider constituency than even the many who are directly affected by precarity. By placing women centre stage, it asserts both their commonality and diversity. Their commonality, because they are the sex that can reproduce — a fundamental fact that disrupts both Helen’s life and Jo’s, and which even today, in an era of freely available birth control and legal abortions, affects women on a daily basis. But as Shelagh shows, this doesn’t mean they can be reduced to their bodies, “cervix havers” or “chestfeeders”. They have diverse ambitions and dreams, the potential to do much more than the world often allows them by virtue of their sex.

Honey reminded us that those often considered marginal to political debate and artistic endeavour — working-class people, especially women and children — were the majority of the human race, and therefore worth listening to. “I write as people speak,” said Shelagh. Ten years after her death, allowing women to speak and to be heard is a struggle feminists are still waging.