Is there a cure for the NHS?

The often called ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British welfare state is beginning to look more like a ‘fly in the ointment’ of the nation. When I see that they are continuing with restrictions to visitors entering hospitals, with some places imposing an outright ban, I wonder if the ‘N’ in NHS stands for ‘Nazi’. I frankly wonder at times just who the people who run the ‘service’ think they are. The rest of the country is heading for freedom from masks and social distancing except in the Socialist Republic of Greater London. Meantime NHS leaders are issuing dire warnings about increasing infections and calling for pandemic related measures to be maintained.

I am always reluctant to criticise the NHS. I was employed within it for many years, two of my daughters are nurses, my first professorship was part funded by the NHS and I worked for a day each week in the local NHS Trust. Since then, I have held a series of honorary positions and served on committees both at local and national level. I must also record that my family and I have been served very well by the NHS over the years. But something is seriously wrong when a service we pay for, handsomely, whether we need it or not can dictate to us the terms and conditions under which we can use it. Our local NHS Trust—Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust—has been very strict about visitors to hospitals and I know of cases where this has caused severe distress as loved ones have suffered and died alone.

The NHS was formed to solve a problem that could not be solved. The main document that was used to justify its formation was AJ Cronin’s novel The Citadel. This book was treated as if it were a serious piece of research or the outcome of a Royal Commission, but it was a work of fiction. Cronin wrote from his experiences both in Harley Street and in a Welsh coal mining town. He compared and contrasted the level of health care available in these two places and this phenomenon was later formulated as ‘The Inverse Care Law’ and trumpeted on every occasion possible by the late Welsh windbag and doctor Julian Tudor Hart. I had the pleasure of meeting Tudor Hart once when I was chairing a conference on healthcare. He was a speaker who went way over his time, and in the end, I had to walk on stage and remove the microphone from him. He was less than pleased at my intervention.

Such self-righteous windbagerry from the likes of Cronin and Tudor Hart is the fuel that flames the passion for our NHS. But nobody stops to consider that it has failed to do the very thing it was established to do, essentially to end the ‘postcode lottery’ of health care (although the term was coined much later). In my hometown of Kingston upon Hull, turning either right or left out of our drive and travelling a mile or so in either direction will take you to two parts of the city between which there is a 10 to 20 year disparity in life expectancy. Yet all have equal access to our wonderful NHS.

The NHS undoubtedly cares for a great many people and, overall, does that quite well. But, strangely, not well enough for any other country to adopt it as a model for their health services. It must care for large numbers of people as, essentially, it has no competition. Except for a miniscule—yet growing—private healthcare sector, the NHS has a monopoly on the health of the nation. Falling for the deception of its own rhetoric, rather than offering advice and treatment, it sees itself increasingly as the custodian of our health. It has long been heading that way, but the Covid-19 pandemic has been just the excuse it needed to move itself centre stage and to have the nation work around it rather than the other way round. Thus, we clapped for carers like morons for a few weeks and had some basic freedoms removed allegedly to save it. Inflationary levels of money were hosed in its direction to buy personal protective equipment (from China), which according to pandemic planning, they should already have had. And a large part of what they did have was out of date and useless. White elephantine Nightingale hospitals were built and never used and the millions of pounds worth of ventilators that were bought (from China) remain in storage. We stuck millions of pounds of PCR and lateral flow tests (from China) up our noses to make sure that we did not forget there was a pandemic. The £70 billion spent on furlough was also aimed at saving the NHS. Never has the tail of a health service—surely something that should emanate from economic prosperity rather than the other way round—wagged the dog of a government treasury.

I have no solution to the problem that is the NHS and if it was providing the best care in the world, I might be tempted to excuse it some of its excesses. But compared with many countries like ours, and according to the World Health Organization ranking, it provides a woeful service. Despite being the backbone of our response to the pandemic—we had no choice—the service is in tatters with record level waiting lists, an extremely demoralised workforce and all we seem to do is offer it more money. Now that the pandemic is all but over and the world and his Covid infected dog are lifting all manner of ridiculous restrictions, the NHS just cannot suffer to step back out of the limelight. Meantime, at one end of the NHS employment spectrum the number of people earning six figure salaries increases while, at the other end, they bleat about not having enough nurses to run the service. If ever a ship was holed below the water line but still building cabins, it is the NHS.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.