Log in
It’s a poorly-kept secret that Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has faced crisis after crisis. But the latest scandal over 3 million “unseen patients” may be its worst yet. In fact, this omnicrisis is worsened by the fact that barely anyone is speaking about it.
Throughout the 2000s, headlines warned of an overwhelmed and underfunded healthcare system that was systemically failing, from facing “another winter of crisis” and bed shortages to a 2005 scandal forecasting that half of all NHS trusts would face hiring freezes due to a “cash crisis.”
These problems spilled over into the 2010s in the wake of the financial crash, worsened by the newly-elected Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government’s goal of cutting public services across the board. The austerity period saw a continued rise in NHS funding, along with warnings in 2015, and again in 2019, that the NHS was on the “brink of collapse.”
The Covid pandemic highlighted the perilous condition of Britain’s healthcare system. Some critics highlighted the apparent lack of funding, while others claimed that the crisis revealed the strength of the NHS in being able to respond under pressure.
Regardless of whether Covid revealed the contradictions or the strength underpinning the NHS, it has left a legacy of exploding waiting lists and what feels like a health service unfit for purpose.
The British Social Attitudes’ survey from 2024 revealed just 21% of respondents were satisfied with the state of the NHS, while 59% were dissatisfied. Perhaps more importantly, the majority want more funding for the NHS (69% say too little is spent) and think that the NHS is spending inefficiently (51%).
The latest NHS statistics revealed that 6.23 million people are on the waiting list, meaning they have been seen by a General Practitioner (GP) and been referred for treatment of some kind. A situation in which nearly 10% of the population is facing long waits is a damning indictment of the system.
Yet this is not the worst of it. The most terrifying finding from the survey is that 48% of those 6.23 million—approximately 2.99 million people—have not been seen by anyone at all. As Rachel Power of the Patients Association said, “The scale is staggering, as nearly half of all patients on a waiting list haven’t been seen by anyone. That’s not a healthcare service; that’s a breakdown.”
To put things in perspective, the NHS’s internal target is for specialists to see patients within 18 weeks (four and a half months) of a GP appointment. This standard was established in 2006, under the New Labour government, with the goal of reducing waiting times from “18 months to 18 weeks.” It was initially met in 2008. By 2012, the NHS started to miss the target, and since 2015, it has not been hit once.
In 2004, just under 1 million people were waiting for an NHS appointment. That has completely spiraled out of control.
Funding for the NHS is hardly lacking, so that certainly isn’t the issue. According to the Health Foundation, between 2025/26 and the end of the parliament in 2029, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) plans to increase spending from £215 billion to £246 billion ($287 billion to $329 billion)—a real-terms increase of 2.8% per year.
Currently, the NHS consumes the majority of that budget, at roughly £192 billion ($256 billion), and, given that the UK’s total managed expenditure is expected to be £1.24 trillion ($1.66 trillion), this means that the NHS alone accounts for 15% of all government expenditure.
Spending on the NHS has only ever crept up: in the 1970s, funding was just shy of £50 billion ($67 billion), and has ballooned rapidly to £250 billion ($334 billion) in the 2020s, growing from 4% of GDP to an enormous 10% in the same period (though it has dipped to 8% since). Often, those who defend the rapid rise in spending claim that this has not kept pace with per capita spending, but this has been proven incorrect by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which reports that “while health spending has grown by an average of 4.1% per year over this period, real per-capita spending has increased by 3.7%.”
All of this is fueled by the NHS’s place as the sacred cow in British politics. Nothing illustrated this better than the slogan in the Covid pandemic that we should “protect the NHS.” Shouldn’t a health service protect us? By treating it as beyond criticism, the NHS has been protected for too long.
… is from page 322 of the 1990 Liberty Fund edition of David Ramsay’s 1789 The History of the American Revolution; Ramsay here writes about the few weeks and months immediately following the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence:
The flattering prospects of an extensive commerce freed from British restrictions, and the honours and emoluments of office in independent states now began to glitter before the eyes of the colonists, and reconciled them to the difficulties of their situation.
DBx: Pictured here is David Ramsay (1749-1815).
The post Bonus Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
THE PALLYWOOD PROTOTYPE: The Nazis would have been proud of Hamas’s vile propagandists.
Hamas is finessing and darkening a tradition of propaganda built by Yasser Arafat, a master of the fabricated sympathetic picture, such as that during Israel’s 2002 operation in the West Bank that showed him alone and besieged in his compound. He sat at his desk with only candlelight to see by – an image the world lapped right up – only for lights to go right back on after the shoot.
As the historian Richard Landes describes in his essential book, Can the Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, one of the defining images of the 21st century, the signal “icon of hatred” against the Israel and the Jews, was the “eyewitness” film apparently capturing Muhammad al-Dura, a defenceless 12-year-old boy, being shot in cold blood by the IDF, while held in his father’s arms, on September 30 2000.
It spread like wildfire. Analysis of the footage later contradicted this narrative. The IDF didn’t kill the boy. But by the time it was corrected, the damage had been done. Nobody cared, then, or now. This laid down a grotesquely immoral media-age template that has been used ever since.
Those of us who have followed media bias against Israel for many years are well versed in the absolutely central role of “Pallywood” – the well-known industry in the Palestinian territories that oversees the staging of fake news footage of Palestinian children and women suffering at the hands of Israel, producing a stream of emotive imagery for the world’s media. No true imagery produced by Israel, or even the true, boastful footage from Hamas of the Israeli hostages it has starved and murdered at close range, can even begin to counter Pallywood’s work.
The use of emotive imagery to peddle genocidal ideology is hardly new. Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Third Reich’s propaganda films (who lived to the age of 101), offers an interesting comparison. Whereas Pallywood stages suffering, Riefenstahl’s art pretended that even those bound for Auschwitz were just fine and dandy. She cast gypsies as frolicking extras, then said they all survived the Holocaust. Not only were they sent to Auschwitz, Riefenstahl was thought, in some cases, to have helped them on their way though she denied it all.
While people were tortured, executed after show trials, or sent to the gulag, the Soviet propaganda department ensured a constant flow of idealised images of healthy, happy, sturdy people: courageous, righteous, industrious, reproductive and the biggest lie of all: finally free.
What makes the global hook, line and sinker acceptance of Hamas propaganda so surreal is that it comes a century after Stalin took power, and nearly a century after Hitler did.
QED:
● No formula, no food: Mothers and babies starve together in Gaza.
—NBC News, July 25th.
● Aid drops over Gaza criticized for being dangerous as starvation mounts under Israel offensive.
—NBC News, yesterday.
Next Page of Stories