Do we love the NHS too much? A popular theory has emerged in recent years. It goes like this: when it comes to the National Health Service, Brits suffer from a species of Stockholm syndrome. We are so deep in collective delusion that we can’t, or won’t, see its miserable faults, let alone countenance the sort of changes that could actually save it. Swapping to a different sort of service – of the kind found in some countries in Europe – would be better, but blinkered by mass hysteria our people simply will not have it. Having at one point rashly decided to make the NHS our “national religion”, we have for some time now been worshipping a god prepared to abandon his flock on a trolley in a corridor for 16 hours. It is all very sad.
This, anyway, has been the general theme of many articles written in response to the NHS’s 75th birthday last week. “We are too blinded by our love for the NHS to recognise its enormous flaws,” ran a headline in the Express. “It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the National Health Service ceased to be a service and transmuted into a religion,” according to a Times leader, “… Britain’s sometimes mawkish obsession with the NHS can be unhealthy.”
