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Good Morning ‘Discontent arises from the knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual’. These are not my words. Anuerin Bevan or Nye Bevan, the Health Secretary responsible for creating our National Health Service 75 years ago, wrote them. Born into a chapel-going family in Wales, he was working in the mines by the age of 14, later becoming a Trade Union activist and politician – MP for Ebbw Vale. Bevan was driven by a knowledge of what was possible. Local public health services existed before the NHS – but not everyone benefitted. The “actual” was exposed in a book which I shed tears over as a teenager - A. J. Cronin’s 1937 novel, The Citadel. It drew on his experience of practising medicine, as a Scotsman in the South Wales valleys, and exposed the injustices and corruption that existed in British health provision. Some credit it with laying the foundation of the NHS. After all Bevan and Cronin worked together at the Tredegar Cottage Hospital in Wales, which explored a new form of healthcare. The gap between the possible and the actual has inspired many revolutionaries and reformers. The conviction that a non-racist police force is possible informs the recent unrest, the discontent on the streets of Paris. And it’s inspired many religious leaders and prophets. The Buddha is recorded as saying, ‘There is one thing that I teach: suffering, and the cessation of suffering’. He invited his followers to face the reality of suffering and the possibility of its ending, through the eradication of greed, hatred and deluded self-seeking. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible continually pointed to the gap between reality and possibility. Amos was critical of the Hebrew people: ‘You, who turn justice into bitterness and cast righteousness to the ground’… but he promised change if people began to hate evil and love good. Reducing the gap between the possible and the actual is difficult. Both Buddhism and Christianity stress this. We don’t easily change. Bevan resigned from his post as Minister of Labour in the early 1950s when the government proposed prescription charges for NHS eye and dental services – a sign to Bevan that his vision was already becoming corrupted. The world contains enough people who are discontented at the gap between reality and what is possible for differences to be made. Bevan and Cronin made a difference. The NHS, with all its faults and strengths, was the result. Our discontent, now, can create further positive change for good. We may not end the gap between reality and what is possible, but we can do something to reduce it.