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Decommodification – where something we need stops being delivered at the whim of the market and becomes a social entitlement – has always been politically controversial. For students of history (or simply those equipped with a search engine and time to spare), the hysteria greeting John McDonnell’s announcement was a familiar ditty. The launch of the National Health Service in 1948, one of the world’s foremost examples of something being decommodified in the interest of the social good, was met with nothing less than horror by those with vested interests in the private provision of medicine.

Sir Bernard Docker, who sat at the top of private firms Daimler, British Small Arms and Westminster Hospital, and was chairman of the British Hospitals Association, denounced the National Health Service bill as a “mechanism in which the patient will get caught and mangled”, and predicted that the decommodification of heathcare would result in the “mass murder of hospitals”. Led by Charles Hill, secretary of the British Medical Association and the soothing voice of the BBC’s wartime show Radio Doctor, a reported 89% of doctors opposed the government’s plan to bring them into the public sector.

Conservatives took up the hue and cry. David Eccles, the Tory MP for Chippenham, said that the in-housing of medical practitioners was tantamount to an assault on “liberty and order”. Labour’s health minister Nye Bevan was singled out as behaving like “a dictator”, in a riff that was picked up by the rightwing press at the time. The Daily Sketch, a Conservative-supporting tabloid, lost its mind entirely: “The state medical service is part of the socialist plot to convert Great Britain into a National Socialist economy. The doctors’ stand is the first effective revolt of the professional classes against socialist tyranny. There is nothing that Bevan or any other socialist can do about it in the shape of Hitlerian coercion.”