The capacity to form an orderly queue is sometimes held up as an admirable quality of the British character, perhaps from historical association with rationing and stoical patience in wartime. But the queue is also an emblem of failure. A famous political advert that helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 depicted a line of people waiting to be seen by an unemployment office under the slogan “Labour isn’t working”. Now it is Conservative government that plainly isn’t working, and the queue is for public services. Many people were appalled, but perhaps not surprised, by scenes of queues that lasted three days this week as would-be patients tried to register at a new NHS dental surgery in Bristol.
On Wednesday, Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, announced an emergency funding package, offering dentists £50 for every new NHS patient taken on. The British Dental Association dismisses this as “rearranging the deckchairs”. Labour, which identified dentistry as an area of critical concern at the start of the year, promises a more substantial expansion of provision.
