No good crisis, including the present COVID-19 epidemic, should go to waste. In this respect, the high priests of Britain’s secular religion, its highly centralised National Health Service, have certainly not been sitting on their hands. There has been so much propaganda in favour of the Service during the epidemic that one might have believed that it was under central direction.
One morning, for example, I received an e-mail advertisement from a chain of bookstores (a near-monopoly in the British bookstore trade) of which I am an occasional customer, for an anthology of stories specially written in praise of the NHS titled Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You. An anthology of poetry, These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS has also just been published. I will pass over in silence the emotional kitschiness of all this.
These books, of course, deliberately confound the NHS itself with the devotion and skill of the people working within it. They are not the same thing — very far from it — and it might well be that good results are often achieved despite the system rather than because of it.
The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been more or less continuous since its foundation in 1948, though it has become ever shriller, as propaganda tends to do, as it departs further and further from reality. Indeed, one might surmise that the purpose of propaganda in general is to forestall any proper examination of reality in favour of simplistic slogans convenient to political power.
I grew up, for example, in the inculcated belief that the National Health Service was, according to the slogan of the time, “the envy of the world.” Millions of people believed this, and indeed it was an assertion heard for many years whenever the subject of health care came up. The slogan was last wheeled out in any force in 2008 for the 60th anniversary of its founding.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, Law & Liberty, 2020-05-04.
September 1, 2020
QotD: The “envy of the world”, Britain’s NHS
Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: Envy, Poetry, Propaganda, SocializedMedicine, TheodoreDalrymple — Nicholas @ 01:00
Comments Off on QotD: The “envy of the world”, Britain’s NHS
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
