A new ritual has entered the weekly routine in locked-down households up and down the British Iles: every Thursday at 8pm, the otherwise quarantined Brits flood the streets to show their adoration for the National Health Service and the “key workers” it employs by clapping and cheering.
It was former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson who said that “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion,” and the worshipping of the public healthcare system runs so deep that it was recently voted “the coolest thing in the world” by its adoring British acolytes. And now, as the country is engulfed in a health crisis, we must all take part in the weekly show of adherence to the faith by clapping in our new national rite. It is part of an overall culture of blind devotion, where critics of the NHS are viewed as heretics and rational debate about the pros and cons of various models for healthcare delivery is suppressed to the point of being totally absent from mainstream debate. It is inconceivable that anything but a tax-funded, centralised behemoth (the NHS is the world’s 5th largest employer) could be the answer to a question we are not even allowed to ask.
Undoubtedly, being a healthcare worker can be a stressful job, even in ordinary times. And these are extraordinary times – though not quite as extraordinary as expected: fears of hospitals being overrun have proved unfounded and quickly mobilised new capacity in the form of temporary facilities such as the London NHS Nightingale hospital are due to close without having seen any patients. It also appears that, despite dramatic rhetoric of health workers “risking their lives” by working, doctors and nurses are no outliers in deaths from Covid-19 (though care workers seem to be more likely to die from it than the average population).
At times like these, when our civil liberties are under unprecedented attack and government is directing our economy, the last thing we need is a population that rallies around the institutions of the state. Indoctrination of Brits into NHS worshippers starts in school and continues through the one-sided reverence that permeates public debate – but more than ever, Britain needs dissenting voices. If official statistics are to be believed, more than 32,000 Brits have died with Coronavirus, and while indignant fury from the left is directed at the government for the scale of the crisis, the organisation that is actually entrusted to provide care for the sick is held totally innocent of any complicity – as usual, the only accepted criticism of the NHS is its alleged underfunding. This despite its ranking at the bottom of a recent international comparison of healthcare systems by The Commonwealth Fund – though only when it comes to keeping people alive; reassuringly for the British, the study still ranked the NHS first overall, due to the authors weighing parameters such as equitable access and safety, where the the NHS came first, as equally important to health outcomes. Politicians are apparently either blind to the dangers of the toxic orthodoxy surrounding the way healthcare is provided in Britain or too cowardly to speak up. But the NHS is a failing system and we should not be whipping up an excited frenzy of adoration.
So no, we will not be clapping for the NHS.