Introduction

Coming into operation on 5 July 1948, the British National Health Service (NHS) has been a much-loved public institution for over seventy years. A YouGov public attitude survey, carried out in 2018, showed that 87 per cent of UK citizens are proud of the NHS, a positive approval rating only topped at the time by the fire brigade with 91 per cent. Given the remarkable and selfless way in which doctors, nurses and all health service workers have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it would not be surprising to discover that the NHS has now broken all British records for public service esteem. For ten weeks after the lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, millions of British citizens, on each Thursday evening at 8 pm, stood at their doors and windows to applaud NHS staff and other essential workers. Public support for the NHS has, surely, never been higher.

The visionary founding principles of the NHS are that health services should be comprehensive, universal and free at the point of delivery. How did this extraordinary new service come to be created? In a nutshell, the Labour Party won a landslide victory in the 1945 general election and Aneurin Bevan, the newly appointed Minister of Health, was charged with establishing a new kind of health service. Bevan deserves the highest praise for pursuing his vision with great energy, negotiating cleverly with the various vested interests and pushing through the legislation.

Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party voted against Bevan's National Health Service Bill in both April and July 1946 (at the second and third readings on the bill). This is worth highlighting, because Boris Johnson, the current UK Prime Minister, asserts that the Conservative Party is ‘the party of the NHS’, a false claim that is flatly contradicted by the historical record. The Conservative Party, as well as opposing the creation of the NHS in 1946, consistently failed to provide adequate funding for the NHS when in government in the 2010– 19 period. As explained in Chapter Two, when COVID-19 appeared on the world scene in January 2020, the NHS was already on its knees as a direct result of damaging Conservative Party policies and spending cuts.