In the aftermath of the Manchester bombing it is heartening to see the vast majority of the population drawing together in support of the victims, their families and the emergency services, strengthening the very sense of social solidarity that all terrorists seek to undermine.

During my lifetime I’ve seen successive waves of terrorism come and go. In the 1970’s ETA, IRA, RAF and others committed many bombings and now thankfully they’ve all given up: now Islamic Jihadists and Neo Nazis predominate. Many years ago I was studying Social Anthropology at LSE and I read a paper called ‘Intercommunal Killing in Cyprus’ by my tutor, the late Peter Loizos. The paper explored the interface between the psychology of the individual perpetrator and the surrounding community that fosters and encourages ideologies of hatred. Individual terrorists may operate alone but they are always encouraged and inspired by some community of people expressing hatred toward some other rival community or social group.

It seems to me the only long term and effective solution is to foster ideologies of love, of social inclusion, social solidarity, pluralism, diversity and egalitarianism. After the Paris bombings in November 2015 I wrote a blog expressing something along these lines. It’s been said before and it’ll be said again. The only way to defeat terrorism is to make it unacceptable to stoke the fires of hatred. I think it was Jimi Hendrix who said ‘when the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.’

The NHS is ours, and needs our support.

On Saturday 4^th March an estimated 250,000 people marched through London in support of the NHS. I, like millions of others, couldn’t be there in person but was with them in spirit, tweeted my support and felt impelled to write this blog. The NHS is one of the things Britain should feel proud of. This current government has a campaign to slash its funding, trash it in the media so as to weaken public support thus allowing them to accelerate their piecemeal privatisation. Many on the right wing of the Tory party want to make it more like the American system. This to me seems insane.

The American system may provide luxurious levels of care for the richest and most expensively insured people and huge profits for private companies running health care and pharmaceuticals, but for the majority it is a very bad system of health care. Many people live in fear of becoming ill and the crippling financial impacts this can have on them at a time when they are anyway most vulnerable. For those with chronic health conditions insurance may be difficult or impossible to obtain. Life expectancy is lower in USA than in any Western European country due to the abysmal access to health care of the poorest people. This is a system we have very little to learn from.

If the UK want to learn from other countries it should be to Scandinavian or other Western European countries that all organise their systems somewhat differently, but all basically offer very much better and fairer systems than the Americans. In Britain we have fewer doctors, less hospital beds and less overall funding per head than in most of Europe. We should increase taxes on all forms of pollution, close tax loopholes and increase top rates of income tax and double expenditure on the NHS. The founding of the NHS was one of the crowning achievements of the post war Atlee government and perhaps the single greatest thing that Britain achieved in the entire Twentieth Century. It should not be slashed, trashed and privatized by this reckless and short sighted government. It will remain a focus of political struggle until this government is thrown out.