The NHS and Coloured Tickets.

It appears that the UK’s National Health Service – the dear old NHS, much loved by the population and envied by many other countries – is under intolerable pressure at the moment. It’s actually been under pressure for quite a few years through underfunding, and the pandemic brought it close to its knees.

But it isn’t so surprising, since the concept of a universal, free-to-use health service doesn’t really sit too well with the increasing reliance on free market economics foisted on us by Mrs Thatcher’s policies. We live in the age of monetarism, in which the emphasis is on reduced taxation so that people will have more money to spend, spend, and spend some more. (Thereby creating the kind of addiction which has been the subject of several earlier posts.)

The problem with reducing taxation, at least in the short term, is that it means there’s less money going into the exchequer so there’s less money to spend on public services like the NHS. And that’s why I fear that the days of the NHS as we’ve known it for the past 70+ years are numbered. I imagine we’ll retain a public system of sorts, but it will be much reduced in scope and quality as the advertisers get to work persuading all those who can afford it – and many who can’t – to take out private medical insurance. We might even change its name from the National Health Service to something like ‘the People’s Health Facility’, and then those who have no option but to use it will be marked out as belonging to the lowest social class.

It reminds me of something I witnessed as a schoolboy. Every Monday morning we were required to hand over payment for the week’s lunchtime meals and we were given blue tickets to demonstrate entitlement. But the poorer kids – those whose parents were in receipt of some kind of means-tested welfare payments – were entitled to free meals, and they were given white tickets. Why the need for different colour tickets? When those kids walked into the dinner hall bearing white tickets, it was immediately evident to all those in visual range that here were the different ones, those belonging to the basement tribe populated by lesser beings. I found that unfair to the benighted parents, and even more unfair to the innocent kids.

Four years ago the NHS saved my life, and it didn’t cost me a penny. I wonder whether my daughter’s generation, and my grandchildren’s generation, will be able to rely on the same good fortune. Or will that age old class awareness push us even further down the slope of social division?