Like all the best quotations, its provenance is contested, but it was probably the late Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson who remarked that: “The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.”
Tellingly, he made the remark – not meant entirely unkindly – some time after he had retired from office, and there remains a remarkably stable and predictable inverse relationship between advocacy of radical reform for the NHS and proximity to a general election.
Sajid Javid, a former health secretary who is standing down at the next election, and Sir Tony Blair, who has also “been there and done that” (and collected some scars on his back along the way), can freely speak their minds about fundamental change and reform.
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