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

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He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. But idolatry doesn’t stop growing numbers of people turning to the private sector when they can’t get GP appointments or when the wait for operations is too long to bear. The Tories were notionally on board for some kind of nationwide healthcare expansion, but not on the scale or in the form that Nye Bevan, health secretary in Britain’s postwar Labour government, brought to the Commons.

He is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party. From Clement Attlee to ‘Clap for Carers,’ this is a nuanced account of both the evolution of the NHS and the myth-making that came with it, as Seaton navigates the history of what is at once ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ and a service perpetually seen to be in crisis. That makes it a miraculous bastion or an infuriating relic depending on which end of the ideological spectrum you ask. A poll in May last year found the health service top of the list of things people thought were best about Britain, beating the nation’s countryside into second place.Although these interpretations still carried some weight in my thinking, I tried to not let them determine my analysis. Among Yale’s titles in British history, Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (2006) , Edmond Smith’s Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire (2021), and Sasha Handley’s, Sleep in Early Modern England (2016) all provided examples of how to achieve such a balance. The two authors are aligned in their analysis, covering much of the same material and identifying many of the same recurrent patterns: the constant pressure for innovation provoking fear of core NHS principles being abandoned; tension between a consumer culture that increasingly expects customised choice and a system that functions by pooling resources on a principle of collective solidarity; the challenge of imposing minimum standards without the perverse, unintended consequences that rigid targets generate; the simple fact that there is never enough money, but also that more cash is not always the answer and Treasury pockets are not infinitely deep.

Next month, when Labour celebrates the anniversary of its proudest achievement it will do so, as usual, in opposition. Andrew Seaton’s book was first published in the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain. Britain’s National Health Service remains a cultural icon—a symbol of excellent, egalitarian care since its founding more than seven decades ago.

Our NHS is an engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival and the people who have kept it running .She doesn’t let her admiration for the NHS as both a political achievement and a healthcare provider impede the exposition of its flaws. Through the perspectives of patients, medical practitioners, trade unions, overseas health experts, and assorted cultural figures, the book explains how the service became an integral part of British identity and why it survived the rise of neoliberalism. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. That is only an option for those who can afford it, or rather, the few who can afford it plus increasing numbers who can’t but are driven by despair to incur the expense anyway.

Anenurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the NHS (5th July 1948) at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, via University of Liverpool.An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it running In recent decades, a wave of appreciation for the NHS has swept across the UK. For most people in the middle it is just there, an immovable feature of the landscape, like a mighty river or majestic forest.