ABSTRACT
Stephen Taylor expanded on his views in his book of 1944, The Battle for Health, published after the White Paper and a work whose title was later adopted by the Socialist Medical Association (SMA) for its travelling exhibition on the National Health Service. If National Service for Health was not entirely coherent about the respective responsibilities of centre and locality, it did nonetheless make it clear that democratic accountability was important, and that here local government had a crucial role to play. As suggested, SMA members felt a considerable sense of achievement over the publication of National Service for Health and the passing of the associated conference resolution. Of course one way of interpreting this would be to argue that the very fact of having representation at all was testimony to the SMA's role in Labour's health policy formation.
