Thought for the Day, 30 October 2007

Indarjit Singh

As a Thought for the Day presenter, I'd like to congratulate the Today Programme on behalf of all of us who work on TFTD on this week's 40th anniversary of presenting news and comment in an attractive and informative way. It's been a huge success,

It's difficult to say which has been the most frequently discussed topic over these years, but the state of the Health Service must be near the top of the list, and as someone whose father was a GP in Birmingham at the start of the Health Service, I've always had more than a passing interest in the subject.

That's why I was moved by an article I saw in the British Medical Journal over the weekend. It was by a London GP Iona Heath. In it she warns that the new system of payments to GP Practices encourages them to think of themselves as 'businesses' working to maximise profits for the partners running the surgery, often to the detriment of patient care and the career development of lower paid salaried doctors.

Her views, backed by impressive statistics, make compulsive reading and will sharpen debate on how far we should go in looking at the Health Service and other Public Services as businesses that in her words leave little room for altruism to flourish.

Sadly it's not only in health care that narrow pursuit of profit distorts and skews life. We see it in sport in the buying and selling of both clubs and players; we see it in cheaply produced trivia that frequently passes for entertainment, and we see it in many other walks of life.

Guru Nanak was never very impressed with the pursuit of profit for its own sake. Asked by his businessman father to invest money for a good return on capital, he spent it looking to the sick and hungry. Invited by a rich businessman to stay with him on one of his travels, he declined and instead stayed with a poor carpenter.

Sikh teachings argue that it is important for us to live positively, working and earning by honest effort. But like teachings of other religions, Sikhism reminds us to be wary of the blind pursuit of wealth for its own sake. In the end the only real value of money is the way we use it to help others, It's a message that's doubly important to today's times in which greed has not only become such a powerful motivator, but also a widely accepted way of life.