In the NHS’s long lifetime, people have consistently made the same two assumptions. The first is that the health service could at any minute cease to exist. The second is that the NHS is so important in Brits’ view of their country and wellbeing that it wins, or loses, elections.
Even when the health service was being set up, its founder Nye Bevan was asking the medical profession to see it as an experiment and give it a go. Within a decade, there were gloomy sounding BBC documentaries marking 10 years of the NHS, asking how much longer it would last. There had already been standoffs within government over how much money it was sucking from other public services. And in so many of the ensuing elections, the Labour party has assumed it will win on the NHS, while the Tories have feared they will lose.
