Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Fast-forward 75 years and we reach the 12th of Hardman’s battles – the struggle, on multiple fronts, to protect Britain from the ravages of Covid, which also became a struggle to protect the NHS itself from falling apart under the strain. As a first-generation university student from a low-income background, Andrew is an advocate of widening access to education, and has volunteered with programming to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue higher education. Hardman describes how the problems inflicted on the health service by the pandemic – trauma for staff equivalent to wartime; colossal expense; disruption of systems and cancellation of routine procedures – are unrelenting and existential. For most people in the middle it is just there, an immovable feature of the landscape, like a mighty river or majestic forest.

Instead, the book shows the active work that was required to embed and adapt the service to social change, outmanoeuvre free-market critics, and associated the institution with Britishness itself. Though the full ramifications are still being uncovered, I argued that the pandemic revealed both the strengths and the limitations of the NHS. Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters. He explains not only why it survived the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century but also how it became a key marker of national identity. It might be vulnerable to spoilage and neglect, but no one imagines it could be erased and no politician who wants to get elected will be caught suggesting such a thing.Second, why did the institution survive to achieve such significance, given that many other parts of the welfare state or public industries also founded in the mid-twentieth century became residualised or privatised? Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no. In this blogpost, part of the 50 Years in 50 Books series for our 50th Anniversary, Andrew Seaton gives us an insight into how he went about writing a history of one of Britain’s best-loved institutions. To celebrate, we have selected 50 important Yale London books from our past, present and future to tell the story of our publishing through a series of articles and extracts.

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She doesn’t let her admiration for the NHS as both a political achievement and a healthcare provider impede the exposition of its flaws. Seaton also charts an interesting grey zone where patriotic enthusiasm for a unique, beloved institution shades into “welfare nationalism” and resentment of foreigners gaining unearned access to a precious, limited resource. From Clement Attlee to ‘Clap for Carers,’ this is a nuanced account of both the evolution of the NHS and the myth-making that came with it, as Seaton navigates the history of what is at once ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ and a service perpetually seen to be in crisis. With an appreciation of the motives of those who have attacked its founding principles, to penetrating analysis of its resilience, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of our NHS. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement.A rising tide of liberalising capitalism has sluiced the NHS but somehow not dissolved its collectivist foundations. Well into the 1970s, unmarried mothers were compelled to give up babies for adoption on the grounds that their condition was proof of moral depravity. The waiting list figures for treatment stood at their worst levels on record, strikes among health professionals unfolded across the service, and unknown numbers of NHS staff seemed to be emigrating for better conditions and pay overseas. Rishi Sunak, knowing how that charge resonates with voters, will swear allegiance to state-run, collectivised healthcare although it is an affront to many of his party’s sacred beliefs. Britain’s National Health Service remains a cultural icon—a symbol of excellent, egalitarian care since its founding more than seven decades ago.