"The NHS is failing us. It needs an urgent and massive overhaul.
As part of that overhaul, let us remember why the NHS exists: to serve us. The idea is, or should be, that we citizens can live as freely as we please, safe in the knowledge that we have funded and built a health service that will catch us when we fall. Yet that idea has been utterly turned on its head by the ideology of lockdown. Now we apparently must self-limit our freedom, and certainly avoid risk, so that we rarely darken the door of the poor NHS. We are witnessing an authoritarian reimagining of the citizen, where we are no longer autonomous beings making independent choices about our lives, but reckless creatures who must occasionally be leashed to ease the burdens on bureaucracy. And it isn’t only in relation to public health. On climate, too, the logic of lockdown dominates, with pressure continually being put on us to live smaller, less impactful lives. Appease the NHS, appease Gaia – that’s your role now, citizen.
Some call this solidarity. In truth, the fretful suspension of free living under pressure from health bureaucrats and eco-authoritarians is the opposite of solidarity. This is not an active coming together of people to achieve a shared goal – it is the cajoled atomisation of people so that they won’t be a ‘drain’ on institutions or the planet. People worry about Long Covid. I think we should be more worried about Long Lockdown – the baleful onward march of the idea that liberty must occasionally be curtailed for the greater good. Listen, we didn’t screw up the NHS – you did. Never has it felt more apt to say: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’
