" A Spectator's Notebook " in your issue of April
5th, Janus comments on the failure of the publication of the National Health Service Bill to produce any sign of public controversy, or of the flooding of the Press with letters for and against the Bill, adding that " unless there has been suppression on an abnormal scale, it is clear that nothing of the sort has happened." I have no knowledge of what is normal or abnormal in the matter of suppression of letters, but I venture to suggest that some amount of this has occurred. The public has been slow to grasp the full significance of the Bill, and the unthinking have been half bemused by the allusions to " free health treatment." To judge by the talk I now hear, the awakening is slowly proceeding, and I rarely hear one word in favour of State-controlled medicine, but on the contrary expressions of profound dismay and horror and even of desperation. I have myself failed more than once to get letters into the Press, and I have before me a copy of a letter sent by a well-known M.P. to a Socialist weekly, courteously but very dearly correcting misstatements in an article on the medical profession. This letter has, it appears, been " suppressed." So has one of my own to the same paper. The absence of letters, therefore, does not seem an indication that the public is undisturbed, nor that
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