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

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He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment. Rishi Sunak, knowing how that charge resonates with voters, will swear allegiance to state-run, collectivised healthcare although it is an affront to many of his party’s sacred beliefs. 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. My initial aspiration with the project was to illuminate the wider significance of the NHS in British life. Nonetheless, the NHS also received an enormous amount of celebration – including, a service in Westminster Abbey, an NHS ‘Big Tea’ occurring in different parts of the U.

The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions.Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS-perpetually "in crisis" and yet perennially enduring-as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat. 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. I hope that my small contribution to telling the service’s history might provide us with another perspective when we think about its future. 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. Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system.

Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters.The two authors are aligned in their analysis, covering much of the same material and identifying many of the same recurrent patterns: the constant pressure for innovation provoking fear of core NHS principles being abandoned; tension between a consumer culture that increasingly expects customised choice and a system that functions by pooling resources on a principle of collective solidarity; the challenge of imposing minimum standards without the perverse, unintended consequences that rigid targets generate; the simple fact that there is never enough money, but also that more cash is not always the answer and Treasury pockets are not infinitely deep. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it running In recent decades, a wave of appreciation for the NHS has swept across the UK.

He 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. How Britain fell in love with socialised medicine, and whether the relationship can endure, is the subject of two books published to coincide with the service’s 75th birthday. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. 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.For most people in the middle it is just there, an immovable feature of the landscape, like a mighty river or majestic forest. In his even-handed analysis, Seaton argues that what is remarkable about the NHS is that it has, to all intents and purposes, survived ‘the tsunami of attempts to marketise’ it. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement.