National Health Service

The National Health Service (NHS) is the umbrella term for the publicly-funded health care in the United Kingdom. Since 1948 it has been funded out of general taxation. The founding principles were that services should be comprehensive, universal and free at the point of delivery.

Quotes

• A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.
  • Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (1952), p. 81

• A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst.
  • Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (1952), p. 85

• No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied aid because of lack of means.
  • Aneurin Bevan, quoted in Robert Maxwell, ‘Aneurin Bevan On The NHS: His Commitment Was Deep, Personal, And Romantic’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 304, No. 6821 (25 January 1992), p. 200

• Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical care can provide.
  • Aneurin Bevan, quoted in Robert Maxwell, ‘Aneurin Bevan On The NHS: His Commitment Was Deep, Personal, And Romantic’, British Medical Journal, Vol. 304, No. 6821 (25 January 1992), p. 200

• Intrinsically the National Health Service is a church. It is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samaritan that we have in any respect of our public policy.
  • Barbara Castle in 1976, quoted in NHS at 60.

• We must establish on broad and solid foundations a National Health Service. Here let me say that there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.
  • Winston Churchill, broadcast (21 March 1943), quoted in The Times (22 March 1943), p. 6

• The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the Government have adopted the policy outlined in the remarks of Lord Beaconsfield, health and the laws of health, and that is the course upon which we have embarked. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.
  • Winston Churchill, speech to the Royal College of Physicians at the Savoy Hotel (2 March 1944), quoted in The Times (3 March 1944), p. 2

• There is virtually no testing anywhere. The WHO policy that you test, you trace, you isolate, you contain is being TOTALLY ignored by the Johnson/Cummings regime. They are not even testing health workers. [...] This is putting thousands of health workers at risk, and essentially abandoning hundreds of them to catch the virus, to spread the virus, and in many cases to die. The experts in a health emergency are, of course, the health workers. But they are silenced by the Tories and the NHS bosses — threatened with dismissal if caught telling the truth to the public they serve — as if we were living in Stalinist China. Those in power are afraid the crisis will expose the reality of NHS under-resourcing and creeping privatisation. Because of Tory underfunding there are not enough testing kits, not enough protective suits, not enough ventilators, not enough staff, not enough, not enough — even though they have known for a quarter of a century that a major pandemic was a clear and present danger. Even now, if they chose, a government invoking near-wartime powers could fix these shortages rapidly by requiring companies to shift production to the needs of fighting the virus. [...] But it involves massive resources, a society-wide strategy to defeat the virus, and that is something the government is not prepared to envisage. The Tories are terrified by any kind of mass mobilisation from below — because it would marginalise elites and empower ordinary people.
  • Neil Faulkner on the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Mass Deaths, Mass Poverty, Mass Repression, co-written with Phil Hearse, 20 March 2020, Mutiny

• [The NHS is] a great national blessing enabling people to live longer and happier lives.
  • Keith Joseph, speech to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool (7 October 1958), quoted in Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett, Keith Joseph (2001; 2002), p. 84

• The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.
  • Nigel Lawson in 1992, quoted in NHS at 60.

• I suggest in The Dirty War on the NHS we look beyond this virus and ask how our current state of fear and its mass obedience will be exploit­ed in future. Will the workers ‘stood down’ ever see their jobs again?
  • John Pilger quoted in John Pilger on 50 years spent shining a light into humanity’s darkest corners, South China Morning Post, (9 May 2020)

• The ruthless sell-off of Britain's National Health Service during Covid by the Boris Johnson govt is a crime against humanity.
  • John Pilger, Twitter (9 July 2020)

• Every GP practice must provide face-to-face as well as telephone and online appointments, as part of making primary care as accessible as possible
  • "Leeds student 'would not have died had he been seen by GP'" (October 18, 2021)

See also

• COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom
• United Kingdom