If the English had a religion, Margaret Thatcher’s Finance Minister Nigel Lawson sneered, it would be the NHS. And even the Iron Lady failed because of the admiration for the NHS: she was allowed to privatize everything from the steel industry to social housing – but the NHS remained a bastion of socialism.
Boris Johnson rallied for Brexit by pledging that money sent to Brussels by the UK would be put into the NHS from now on. That drew. But two years after the Brexit decision by the British Parliament, the NHS is in an existential crisis. Patients wait up to 99 hours in the emergency room; up to 25 hours to an ambulance. 500 people die every week because the emergency doctors don’t come.
800 NHS GPs have closed their practices in the last eight years alone. There is no substitute. NHS dentists and clinics are almost non-existent. A third of Britons under 35 want to spend money on private insurance on top of the taxes they pay for the NHS. Better than relying on the health service that “the world is the envy of Britain”, as politicians left and right have claimed for decades.
What happened? Superficially it is Covid plus a flu epidemic plus strikes. Brexit has made things worse: surgeons from all over the EU used to fly to the UK for the weekend to earn extra income from operations; Nurses from Eastern Europe used to keep the system running.
But the cause of the misery lies deeper: a state, bureaucratized, centralized system just doesn’t work. Leftists claim the Conservatives, in power since 2010, have wrecked the NHS. But Labor PM Tony Blair has poured billions into the system with no improvement in performance.
The current health minister is said to have said he doesn’t know what to do with the money, even if he were to get more. Meanwhile, the British enjoy worse care than the Germans, the French and even the Americans. It cannot be said often enough: socialism does not work.
But the NHS crisis is also a symptom of a deeper malaise. No one believes the British are capable of halfway functioning capitalism. Neither does she herself. Nothing came of the visions of “Global Britain” associated with Brexit; the Brits are anxiously looking inward. The radical liberalization of the economy in the spirit of Thatcher that Liz Truss envisaged fell through on the markets because Great Britain’s financiers did not trust the country’s capabilities. Now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has to demonstrate his willingness to save.
What happens when you lose faith? You often also lose faith in yourself. A radical restructuring of the health system, for example along the lines of the German model, could help; but that would shake the illusions of its own uniqueness that the country has cultivated for decades, to its own detriment.
