Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

"This is a very big book about an institution which inspires enormous loyalty and that title, Our NHS , is absolutely on the mark. The story is beautifully told. The author, Andrew Seaton, feels very much part of the story of the NHS, but shows the difficulties of saying whose NHS it is. There is what he describes as a sort of nationalism around the NHS. There’s a great pride engendered by the Labour Party—who created the NHS—in it being a uniquely British institution, and it is often contrasted with the dysfunctional state of US medicine. There are all sorts of ways in which the book reflects on its own preconceptions. ‘Our’ NHS: What about all the immigrants who have made it work since the 1950s? It could not have survived without them. It also could not have survived without patients feeling that they had a wonderful deal from the NHS, against the forces of ‘neoliberalism’ (a word he uses a lot) and those who would wish to monetize it and turn it into a private enterprise. Mrs. Thatcher started down that road and found it difficult. So those who have never been enthusiastic about the NHS have had to persist with this organization. It is in a terrible state now because of the various assumptions about trying to make it profitable, and yet it is still there. There was the ambiguity, during COVID, of people clapping for the NHS. It started as something spontaneous and joyful and defiant against an illness. The government tried to capitalize on that, and the clapping died away because people recognized they were being enlisted in a government propaganda project. Not entirely, no. An honest historian should not make their work about how things must go on. Historians are not good prophets. What we can do is show the reality of the past and its complications, its complexities, and highlight particular features of that past. The theme of immigrants being the absolute bedrock of the service is really important, and that’s well taken. It has been said that the NHS is the national religion now, rather than the Church of England. I’m sure that’s right: people esteem it for all its faults and are angry with it for not living up to their ideals in a way that religion once was."