Afua Hirsch (Celebrate the NHS at 70. But don’t forget what inspired it, 27 June) hints at the deterioration of progressive politics over the past 70 years when she writes that in 1948 “rights” meant access to decent living standards for all not just the protection of minorities. The progressives of 1948 built an NHS benefiting everyone, whose public support even Theresa May and the Tory press cannot overcome. The identity-politics obsessed progressives of 2018, with their hyperliberal dislike of traditional social structures, their hostility to democratic control over immigration from the EU and to enforcement of the law on immigration from outside the EU, and their obsession with “unconscious bias”, have achieved only a national vote to leave…
