On 5 July 2018, the National Health Service will celebrate its 70th birthday. It appears to stand as a monument to the era of social democracy in defiance against the tide of neoliberalism. It remains free at the point of use and for the most part publicly funded. It is a cherished, national institution more popular in polls than the monarchy, the army or the BBC. Its status is so sacred that any government contemplating full-scale privatization would likely confront electoral suicide.
Yet, in reality, there may not be very much to celebrate. In the winter of 2016/17, the British Red Cross took the unprecedented step of declaring a humanitarian crisis inside the NHS. This year, there was another winter crisis of similar magnitude. A recent paper found that there have been 120,000 excess deaths in England since 2010 linked to austerity. Nearly £40 billion ($55.5bn) of ‘efficiency’ savings over this decade have contributed to this state of affairs.
