Last night I attended a talk given at the Evans household by Max Gammon, one of the regular Friday evening meetings that Tim Evans and I take it in turns to host (he on the second Friday of the month and me on the last). It eventually became an argument between Christians and Atheists, but before that, Gammon made many interesting points about the degeneration over the years of the National Health Service.

One point of relevance to this blog he made with particular force, which is how bad it was when nurses stopped being trained in wards, doing nursing, and instead did an "education" in classrooms and seminar rooms. In Gammon's mind there was clearly a direct relationship between what many people regard as "education" and that other, much more malign modern tendency, "bureaucracy".

"Education", in other words, came across as more like malignant disease than as a modern blessing.

As for the ruckus about Christianity, I felt, as the devout Atheist that I am, that if Gammon had confined himself to saying that Christians make better nurses, or that a revival of Christianity might make it easier to run hospitals, I might have gone along with him. But instead he went out of his way to present Christianity as the logical outcome of his analysis of the NHS. Paul Coulam, veteran of many Samizdata comment wars, was present, and he put the case against Christianity with his usual lack of equivocation, egged on by the likes of me growling from the floor, and by Patrick Crozier, who pointed out that an identical nationalised degeneration had occurred in the railways and nobody blamed that on the decline of religion.

Nevertheless, a most stimulating and enjoyable evening.