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Many years ago, on a rugby field Somewhere In England, I made full and frank allegations concerning the parentage and sexual preferences of a 19-stone prop forward who had just aimed his size 24 studs at my supine body as I lay helpless in the mud where he had recently hurled me.

I repeated these sentiments as the toe of his boot made unwelcome contact with my floppy parts, and expanded pithily on the subject of his mother’s profession and his father’s anonymity once upright again.

The prop forward promptly clattered me senseless, dumped me back in the mud and put the boot in again. It hurt quite a lot and the bruises lasted a long time.

The next time somebody threw me into the mud and made free with his boots, I thanked the culprit politely and offered to buy him a pint in the bar afterwards.

The point of this tale is obvious, I hope: we learn the lessons of history.

But it’s an awareness of the lessons of history that seems to have deserted us in recent years.

Of course, if you’re an American on the Republican right and a member of the Tea Party, an awareness of how to spell your own name is probably beyond you.

How on Earth have the loonies of the Tea Party been able to hold us to ransom with their dream of an economics based on the survival of the fittest that was discredited decades ago? How has anybody given credence to their reliance on a fully free-market interpretation of economics that defies every lesson of history?

I would argue that it’s because Americans don’t understand history – they don’t understand the New Deal or the post-war economic miracle that got them into the luxurious position of being able to shaft the rest of the world while wobbling their colossal backsides into the next fast food joint on the block. These are, after all, people who have managed to create the most monstrous debt mountain in history without paying any of it for a health service to look after the ill and elderly.

Only education can save them – an awareness of the lessons of history, the needs of the wider world and the consequences of their greed and ignorance.

Closer to home, our health service remains a topic of the deepest controversy – but at the same time a topic so set about with taboos that nobody’s brave enough to make any suggestions at all about getting out of the economic mess it’s in, bar muttering darkly about bureaucracy.

What does history teach us? Well, it was 60 years ago this year that Nye Bevan, the creator of the NHS, resigned from the Cabinet in protest at the introduction of charges for spectacles and dentistry. Once the line of charging had been crossed, he argued, it would be easier to go further and further.

He was right, of course. Scandalously, less well-off people these days must endure the agony of problems with their teeth because treatment for many is unaffordable.

More to the point, Bevan had had to bribe doctors and consultants merely to get the formation of the NHS through against an unwilling Conservative establishment in the first place. “I stuffed their mouths with gold,” he famously declared. Does this knowledge of history perhaps teach us that some of these bribes could have had their day by now?

“If we don’t pay consultants and surgeons enormous amounts of money, they will leave,” say people to whom I make this point.

“Fine,” I say. History teaches us that where there is a need for skills and fair payment for providing those skills, people from home and abroad will learn those skills. Let the consultants take their consciences to the United States where sick people are turned away. I’m sure they’ll be able to live with that.

History also teaches us that the NHS today treats many more diseases than even existed in Bevan’s day, with a panoply of drugs more vast than he could have imagined. It teaches us that there is a Faustian pact between diseases and the drugs that treat them. So is it really wise to aim for reforms designed to pointlessly reinforce the pointless presence of the free market? This is the unspoken cycle of financial crisis that is at the heart of the NHS to me – the absurdity of a health service providing decency to all that has to pay rip-off open market prices to hideously wealthy pharmaceutical corporations.

Tackle top wages, drug prices and, yes, bureaucracy and you may be half way there. But no plan for the NHS will succeed unless you tackle the patients too – for example, what sort of saving would there be if every time somebody had a cold they refrained from going to the doctor?

Something else happened 60 years ago: the general election of 1951, in which the Conservatives triumphed because the left was split on just how far to expand the 1945 Labour Government’s programme of nationalisation, among other things. Nationalise the banks?, said the centre. Ridiculous. And they were right. We had to wait another 58 years for that.

And another thing

I’m grateful to the lawyers representing Reiver and Minty for their comments regarding my piece on collie dogs last week. I would like to make it clear that they are dogs whose personal habits, hygiene and pursuits are beyond reproach, while my own collie is as mad as a box of Tea Party frogs. I further undertake to make reparation with a box of Winalot shapes.

Meanwhile, a funny thing happened down by the river last week. I was stood by the open boot of my jeep at the end of our walk, yelling for my deaf, absent mutt: “Here! You useless, stupid, wretched waste of space!” Well, who should appear as I uttered those words but George Osborne? So that’s where he’s been, I thought. I gave him a biscuit. He seemed pleased.

And finally

The world is mad, to be sure, but where there’s Test Match Special, there’s hope.