Another day, another blood sacrifice at the altar of the National Health Service. Last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves defended her inheritance tax raid on farmers by saying that it is time that farmers pony up their fair share for the NHS. While it is abundantly clear to most of us that this is nothing more than a guilt-tripping ploy by the Chancellor – having dug it up from the dredges of tired government narratives – to try and justify her destructive raid on Britain’s farming industry, it is rather telling that the NHS is her first port of call in a feeble attempt to win over a public that is in uproar over her wildly unpopular measure.
Time and again Britons have been told the familiar spiel by successive governments from all parties that more and more sacrifices need to be made in order to ‘save our NHS’. Healthcare already constitutes the second highest source of government expenditure at £212 billion, a close second behind pensions and welfare, yet we are still expected to fork out more money, no questions asked.
Not only that, our basic civil liberties are now also fair game. One need not look very far back to recall the draconian measures imposed by the government during the pandemic that stripped us of our basic rights, denied children across the country a proper education, and destroyed vast swathes of our nation’s economy. This was all done in a vain attempt to ‘stop the spread’ and ‘save the NHS’, catchy slogans emblazoned in bright colours and slapped onto ministerial podiums across Whitehall. Now the government wants to ban smoking outright, tax sugar and fat to death and rob people of their right to choose, all in the name of ‘preventative measures’ to rein in spiralling NHS costs.
One might think that, after all these sacrifices that we as a country have made, that the NHS might actually deliver the kind of results that we pay through the nose for. Yet we are met with disappointment after disappointment, with year-long waiting lists being the norm, high rates of avoidable, excess deaths, and the NHS severely underperforming on cancer survival rates compared to our Western neighbours. Despite all these failures, we are still expected to sing its praises and be grateful, all while we shovel more and more cash into our ever-inefficient health service, as if more cash will buy a magic wand that fixes everything.
Why do we put up with it? The answer is simple: for too long the NHS has been undeservedly deified by the British public. The NHS continually tops polls that ask what Britons are proudest of, far ahead of our culture, businesses, and democratic way of life. At the height of the pandemic, we were encouraged to clap and cheer in the streets by the government, not for the nurses and doctors who put their lives on the line, but for the NHS. Such universal and uncritical veneration for what is essentially a government body – one that has the power and influence to change our very way of life – should be enough to send shivers down the spines of anyone who is remotely sceptical of state power. Indeed, the NHS has often been described as the unofficial state religion of the UK; the heath service giveth, and the heath service taketh away.
While seemingly harmless, such groupthink and public idolatry of the NHS is perhaps the biggest roadblock to achieving actual reform and improvement of our beleaguered health service. Any suggestion that we should find ways to streamline or make the provision of healthcare more efficient through market mechanisms – such as social insurance-based healthcare that is the norm in Europe – are met with furious howls of a sinister plot to privatise the NHS and institute a dystopian American-style healthcare system. Such unwarranted fury and fearmongering are enough to scare off any politician who wants any sort of future in Westminster from pursuing any meaningful reform, so instead we are treated to the same old story about the need to sacrifice more of our money and freedoms at the altar of the NHS.
As the NHS continues to lose the trust of the British public, enduring scandal after scandal, we must be honest to ourselves and be willing to fundamentally reconsider the nature and structure of our health service, and to let go of our romantic notions of the NHS as our state nanny. With much effort and perseverance, we may yet save the NHS from itself and along with that, perhaps some of our freedoms as well.
