It's an interesting slogan: one cynically designed to play on people's love for a state run health care system staffed by (heroic overworked) doctors and (angelic underpaid) nurses and accorded sacred cow status amongst the Great British Public. You can criticise anything and everything, it seems, but not the mythical monolithic NHS, no matter how poor, actually, the level of service provison and how desperately in need of reform it is.
I don't know when or why the NHS became quite such a powerful symbol of national pride and identity, but as Danny Boyle's preposterous London 2012 opening ceremony demonstrated, that is precisely what it has become. [1] We may not have a mighty empire any longer, or a world beating football team, but we do have Great Ormond Street and Pudsey Bear.
As one commentator notes, the NHS "provides the state with its moral purpose, and citizens with an idea not of the Good Life, but of the Healthy Life". But it also, of course, allows the state to relate itself to us not as citizens so much as patients or patients-to-be, ascribed a number on one huge waiting list. From cradle to grave, the Nanny State is there to care for us (which is why, ironically, we must now stay at home and protect it).
Ultimately, however, as Tim Black argues:
"The NHS doesn’t need saving; it needs demystifying. And perhaps then, stripped of its ideological role as the long therapeutic arm of the state, it might be possible to have an honest and open debate about what exactly we want from a national health provider. A point-of-need service, or a secular religion?" [2]
Notes
[1] Boyle's 20-minute long tribute to the NHS - with dancing medics and a giant baby - brought a tear to the eye of many a viewer, but I'm not the only one to have found it absurd, delusional, and slightly sick-making in its sentimentality. Whilst the vast majority of people employed within the NHS are well-intentioned and hard-working, that shouldn't blind us to the grim reality of many UK hospitals or make the system (in all its bureaucratic ineptitude and wastefulness) immune to criticism.
[2] Tim Black, 'NHS: the state religion', Spiked (10 Jan 2017): click here to read online.
For a related post to this one - on clapping our NHS heroes - please click here.
