The Promise

To promise nearly fifty million people truly universal health care - ‘cradle to the grave’ - is crackers.

1945. In a country exhausted and crippled by debt after six years of war, time is up for Winston Churchill’s Tories. With a rallying cry for change, Labour wins an astonishing, landslide election victory.

Clement Attlee may be an unlikely prime minister and his cabinet of competing heavyweights—from the loyal Ernest Bevin to scheming Herbert Morrison—argue furiously about how to realise their manifesto: to make a welfare state, build millions of homes, reorganise dilapidated schools, and most dramatically, create a National Health Service that is free at the point of need.

Driven by the passionate and courageous radical Ellen Wilkinson and the visionary firebrand Nye Bevan, a very British revolution is in the air. But in the face of bitter opposition, is this an audacious pledge of hope or a promise too far?