Wishing Our NHS A Very Happy 72nd Birthday

Birthdays. The one day each year when you can make requests, however outlandish, that friends and family are compelled by tradition to oblige. If only it were that simple for our NHS.

Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Like so many people around the country celebrating a birthday during this time of national crisis, the National Health Service --which turns 72 on the fifth of July-- will have to ‘make do’ with its festivities. Surgeons and porters, nurses and cleaners, doctors and receptionists, care workers and paramedics are working around the clock to ensure that we continue to receive impeccable care.

As is customary on birthdays, let’s turn back the clocks to the birth of the NHS, one of the defining moments in modern British history.

When the National Health Service Act was pushed through by Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1946, Britain had endured years of austerity. Food rationing was still in place, there was a drastic shortage of housing and infrastructure had been heavily damaged during the war.

Nevertheless, Health Minister Nye Beavan devised an ambitious plan to guarantee healthcare for all, sharing the cost amongst the general population. For the first time, treatment would be afforded on the basis of citizenship, not income.

Nationalising two and a half thousand hospitals was not, in Beavan’s own words, “an altogether trouble-free gestation”, facing opposition from both outside and within the Labour Party. Yet the Welshman, himself a former coal miner, fought tooth and nail for the law to be passed. If Mr Beavan could witness the lifesaving role that the NHS continues to play in our society today, he would be immeasurably proud.

Universal healthcare has become a basic fact of our everyday lives, but a fact that we must never take for granted.

Over the past decade, the NHS has suffered the crippling effects of austerity, brought on not by war, as in the days of its inception, but by economic incompetence. Nurses, of whom there is already a glaring shortage, have seen their wages fall by 8% (in real terms) since 2010 whilst hospitals throughout the country have lost 18% of their bed space. All so that the Conservative Party could blindly implement a free-market programme which ultimately hindered Britain's recovery from the 2007 financial crisis.

These decisions, combined with shambolic leadership from Downing Street amid the outbreak of Coronavirus, have put the NHS under the greatest strain it has experienced in its 72-year history. But the superhuman efforts of staff across the country have ensured that it has coped under that immense pressure. Risking their lives on a daily basis looking after patients, even when their own families are left vulnerable, no words can do justice to their bravery.

And, while it is positive that NHS workers are recognised for their efforts, they are worth far more than a weekly round of applause.

As Helen Whyley, director of the Royal College of Nurses in Wales points out, “our members don’t just want a pat on the back for their work – this is a historic opportunity for the government to right wrongs”. An opportunity that the government --which has still refused to officially commit to an NHS pay rise-- seems reluctant to take.

For years NHS colleagues have borne the burden of austerity. So now, as the service marks its 72nd birthday, it is about time they were shown some material generosity by Johnson, Sunak and co.