Painting the health service as inefficient ignores a decade of chronic underfunding
Each time I’ve gone for a Covid jab, I’ve walked out with a warm glow. It wasn’t just relief to have the protection, or awe at the scientific feats that were pulled off to get a vaccine in my arm, but a sense of national pride in the NHS, an institution that is collectively ours, there for us in good times and bad. Just seeing the NHS’s distinctive blue-and-white logo is enough to make my heart swell a little.
I am far from alone. Britons feel more proud of the NHS than we do of the royal family or the armed forces. It’s been a constant source of frustration for the supposedly patriotic political right over the past 40 years, leading former chancellor Nigel Lawson to coin the cliche of the NHS as an English religion in the early 1990s. According to them, our soppy sentimentalism is holding the country back from getting the healthcare we need.