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

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It is a ritual dance displaying a peculiarity of British politics. The country that led global trends in privatisation of state assets and whose most electorally successful party makes a fetish of free-market enterprise finds itself also home to one of the world’s most popular and durable socialist institutions.

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I also wanted to write a book that was both academically rigorous and would possess cross-over appeal to a general audience. Yale University Press seemed the perfect fit in this regard, allowing for ample space for both the things that academics tend to care about (references and scholarly debates) and the things that the general public prioritise (accessible prose and human stories). Among Yale’s titles in British history, Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (2006) , Edmond Smith’s Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire (2021), and Sasha Handley’s, Sleep in Early Modern England (2016) all provided examples of how to achieve such a balance. With the help of my editor, Jo Godfrey, and the encouragement of colleagues at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, where I completed the book as a postdoctoral researcher, I rewrote the manuscript and added two new chapters that more concretely brought the book up to the present. Both the survival and growth in popularity of the NHS suggests the possibility for social democratic politics to endure in our historical accounts of Britain’s twentieth century, against narratives of the total victory of neoliberalism after the 1980s. This poster’s inclusion of the line ‘Tories Voted Against It’ also drew sharp boundaries about who could claim credit for the service. Yet, at its origins, the NHS sat alongside a much wider sense of what contemporaries were beginning to call a ‘welfare state’ and it did not possess its later pre-eminence. Gradual association of the NHS with ‘British’ values

Seaton] is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party.”—Rafael Behr, The Guardian I trained both in the U.K. and the U.S., holding a Ph.D in History from New York University (NYU), an MA in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from King’s College London, and a BA in History from the University of Oxford. Seaton’s] analysis is sharp and compelling and makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship surrounding what he terms ‘Britain’s best-loved institution.’”—Sarah Neville, Financial TimesFighting for Life is up-to-date, with a good account of the disastrous Covid years, and it describes well the slow downgrading, over time, of what the NHS is deemed to offer, a shift punctuated by bursts of new ideas during the Blair years and in the Lansley reforms – most of which wound up in a healthcare scrapyard somewhere in middle England. Hardman is suitably cynical of election promises: more nurses, more doctors, more GPs and better mental-health services. Just watch how the current health minister, Steve Barclay, recently wriggled to get out of the “40 new hospitals” promise. The fact that Jeremy Hunt sported an NHS badge on his lapel (whereas none of his predecessors undertook such a fashion choice) demonstrated the legacies of New Labour’s efforts to amplify the significance of the health service in public life. The NHS’ popularity shows social democratic politics surviving the Thatcher years

This shift marked the growth of what I describe in my book as ‘welfare nationalism’, meaning a belief in welfare services as reflective of values essential to the nation. In addition, the NHS began to stand apart from the wider welfare state in terms of its prominence from this point.

Paediatrics: Dr Conor Doherty, Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases, NHS GG&C and Susan Kafka, Advanced Pharmacist - Paediatric Antimicrobials & Medicine, NHS GG&C Across the country, the government stimulated local celebrations in a way unseen in prior years. After 2010, the Conservative Party – which had oscillated between begrudging acceptance and hostility throughout the service’s history – was forced onto New Labour’s ground in terms of rhetoric if not action.

Andrew Seaton traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. 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. A History of Nursing (Louise Wyatt) A History of Nursing explores nursing from the earliest records of the caring profession, from Mother Nature to the influence of ancient scripts and folklore on the nursing we see today. The book also explores the effect the military had on nursing in the nineteenth century; how nursing turned from religious principles to secular nursing, and how education and standards improved the safety, development and governance of the profession. Fighting for Life: The Twelve Battles (Isabel Hardman) In 1948, the National Health Service was born with the founding principal to be free at the point of use. This book traces the history of our health service from Victorian healthcare in the early 20th century, comparing the problems and illnesses of 1948 to those we face today and the sustainability of the NHS as it stands now. Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best Loved Institutions (Andrew Seaton)There is some truth in the assertion, but the NHS tells a different story. New Labour escalated the pre-existing welfare nationalism around the NHS to new heights. Its leading figures never stopped invoking ‘Our NHS’ in speeches and they made pointed comparisons with other countries. Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters. 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. 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. Fly-on-the-wall documentary inside a GP practice in Gateshead as it faces increasingly heavy demand. Radio 5 Live