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

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But idolatry doesn’t stop growing numbers of people turning to the private sector when they can’t get GP appointments or when the wait for operations is too long to bear. It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain. Fluidly written, richly detailed and frequently surprising, Our NHS is the portrait of a social democratic institution that withstood the assaults of neoliberalism, battle-scarred and transformed but still very much alive. Though the full ramifications are still being uncovered, I argued that the pandemic revealed both the strengths and the limitations of the NHS.

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. Yet its success was hardly guaranteed, as Andrew Seaton makes clear in this elegantly written, highly original history of an institution that survived numerous crises to become a model for the democratic welfare state and the very antithesis of the health inequities we face today as Americans. On one hand, the service had survived and it was able to perform functions such as distributing vaccines with a high degree of public trust.After all, it was not inevitable at the service’s inception in 1948 that it would one day regularly top opinion polls of what made people ‘most proud to be British’. Andrew Seaton’s book was first published in the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.

An expert in the history of modern Britain and the NHS, he received his PhD in history from New York University in 2021. This work is a wide-ranging history of the British coal industry in the twentieth century, exploring its legacies on human health, pollution, decolonisation, political economy, and environmentalism. One of the things that kept me motivated to finish writing the book lay in how the service’s history allowed me to talk about lots of different things, from shifting meanings of class and gender, to Britain’s experience of Commonwealth immigration, to architectural aesthetics or debates in medical economics.It is my hope that Our NHS can complement work currently being undertaken by other scholars that also illuminates the past of this world-famous institution, whether through smaller case studies or in macro terms. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. He and Hardman are in agreement on the vital role that immigration has played in keeping the health service functioning. At the next general election, Keir Starmer will, as usual, warn the country not to trust the Tories with the NHS.