Thank You, NHS
While the country thanked the NHS, erected murals, and clapped into the abyss, the country plunged further into catastrophe.
If there is one thing that has been consistent across all countries and cultures over the past year, it is needless healthcare-worship. But nowhere has this phenomenon appeared so sickeningly apparent as it has in Britain. We’ve had the “clap for the NHS” ceremonies, the murals forming nurses into saints and angels, and the calls to “protect the NHS” – as if the NHS were a living, breathing baby needing shelter from a storm. Even Britain’s main national religion, football, has kowtowed to the NHS, thanking it for its paternal role as the country’s saviour.
This infantilised discourse is very much a product of the modern world. With citizens far removed from the ages of religion, family, and community, national identities are now formed around vapid expressions of a nation’s life. Culture is reduced to any expression the liberal political order may deem convenient to its cause, and a technocratic vision of healthcare has become the liberals’ favourite insignia during the ongoing Covid crisis.
Of course, a healthcare system is just that – a healthcare system. So any expression of gratitude or love towards such a system is a folly. After all, a healthcare system is there to serve the people, not the other way around (as one guest on GB News suggested).
Treating a system like a child would treat its father has its limits. As revealed recently, the NHS took a hit in its ranking as a healthcare system amongst other countries during the Covid pandemic. The Commonwealth Fund’s study had placed the NHS fourth out of a list of eleven wealthy nations – this latest study marks a drop from first place. The study cites decreased satisfaction amongst Britons in regard to the accessibility of treatment. There’s little doubt that much of this is due to lockdown, which saw 50,000 dementia cases go unseen.
Should we be thanking the NHS for its slide in rankings? Should we be thanking the NHS for missing countless dementia and cancer cases? Of course not. It is not wrong to express gratitude to healthcare workers who tirelessly give up their time in order to ensure their countrymen stay healthy, but it is ludicrous to raise them to the level of sainthood while also personifying the system they work under.
It is ill-advised to do so because the NHS is a system which is beholden to the people in charge; the Government, along with the NHS, has failed its people by making ruinous decisions which have assured national disaster. It is in the power of people, not systems, to change conditions and solve problems. And in ignoring this fact, Britain sleepwalked into disaster. While the country thanked the NHS, erected murals, and clapped into the abyss, the country plunged further into catastrophe.
