Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system. Through the perspectives of patients, medical practitioners, trade unions, overseas health experts, and assorted cultural figures, the book explains how the service became an integral part of British identity and why it survived the rise of neoliberalism. In doing so, the book calls attention to the endurance of social democracy in a nation where this form of politics is commonly depicted as vanquished by the late-twentieth century. Our NHS has received positive coverage in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Lancet, and The Literary Review.

Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters. It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain. NHS Education for Scotland: Sabine Nolte, Principal Educator, Public Health Team, Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions (NMAHP) Hardman is a meticulous journalist with a gift for storytelling. She doesn’t let her admiration for the NHS as both a political achievement and a healthcare provider impede the exposition of its flaws. She modulates her tone with subtle precision, using controlled fury for scandals born of callous neglect and ironic detachment when transporting the reader into cabinet discussions where a health secretary’s vanity conflicts with a chancellor’s parsimony. It includes personal recollections from healthcare professionals on the frontline and from the patients themselves, in their care. The NHS at 70: A Living History (Ellen Welch) Our Stories is a beautiful and heart-warming collection of tales of the rich history of the NHS, told through the ordinary people who have experienced it and who have turned it into the beating heart of our country. The NHS: Britain’s National Health Service, 1948-2020 (Susan Cohen)Phil Hammond on his role in exposing medical malpractice and whether this has done more harm than good. Using archive from the BBC, Private Eye, newspapers and his seven books. Seaton…charts an interesting grey zone where patriotic enthusiasm for a unique, beloved institution shades into ‘welfare nationalism’ and resentment of foreigners gaining unearned access to a precious, limited resource”. One might expect to see the NHS front and centre in Labour’s 1945 General Election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future. However, full employment, industrial recovery, and housing received more attention, reflecting the priorities of Clement Attlee’s incoming government. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival – and the people who have kept it running in the face of ideological opposition, marketization, and workforce crises. In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS. He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. He explains not only why it survived the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century but also how it became a key marker of national identity. Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS—perpetually “in crisis” and yet perennially enduring—as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat.

I have just published my first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best-Loved Institution with Yale University Press.The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. First, why did the NHS take on such popular acclaim? After all, it was not inevitable at the service’s inception in 1948 that it would one day regularly top opinion polls of what made people ‘most proud to be British’. Second, why did the institution survive to achieve such significance, given that many other parts of the welfare state or public industries also founded in the mid-twentieth century became residualised or privatised? Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. Instead, the book shows the active work that was required to embed and adapt the service to social change, outmanoeuvre free-market critics, and associated the institution with Britishness itself. By highlighting these dynamics, I build on insights from prior historical scholarship (often informed by social science) that explained the resilience of welfare states through structural factors like the advantages of pooling risks or the power of ‘path dependence’ in social policy. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. Comedian and broadcaster Dr Phil Hammond's How I Ruined Medicine draws on his own experiences to ask if his investigations into medical malpractice have done more harm than good for healthcare overall.