Save our National Health Service? Why, exactly?
I recall being involved in a campaign against the closure of a local hospital – St Leonards in Shoreditch – under the Labour government of the late 1970s. When I approached a young man in the local street market on a Saturday morning asking him to support the campaign, in a dramatic gesture he pulled up his shirt to reveal a spectacular midline scar up his abdomen. ‘That’s what they did to me in that hospital, just to get my appendix out.’ As far as he was concerned, the sooner it was closed down the better. He refused to sign our petition. (Though the hospital was closed, St Leonards, the site of a nineteenth-century workhouse, remains the base of local community-health services.)

This encounter reminded me that while, as both professionals and as patients, the middle classes have generally benefited from the NHS, the less prosperous have often experienced poor-quality care and inferior standards of service. In more recent years, as the focus on health has widened to the concept of wellbeing and the concerns of doctors have expanded to cover wide areas of personal lifestyle and behaviour, a substantial section of the population (amounting to at least a quarter) has become the particular object of medical condescension and authoritarian public-health intervention. It is not surprising to find a marked lack of enthusiasm for campaigns to ‘save the NHS’ among a public that is regarded – and treated – with such contempt by the modern NHS....