NHS Highland: Dr Adam Brown, Consultant Microbiologist and Alison MacDonald, Area Antimicrobial Pharmacist

By the 1980s, many Britons came to agree with this interpretation, embracing the service as a national inheritance that stood in stark opposition to other health systems – particularly to medical services in the US – rather than part of an international movement towards universal health care for all. ‘Welfare nationalism’ and New Labour 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.

A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

Fast-forward 75 years and we reach the 12th of Hardman’s battles – the struggle, on multiple fronts, to protect Britain from the ravages of Covid, which also became a struggle to protect the NHS itself from falling apart under the strain. Andrew Seaton 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. A History of Nursing (Louise Wyatt) For BBC Radio 4, coverage will begin with Dr Kevin Fong and Isabel Hardman in a special episode of Start the Week alongside GP Phil Whitaker and the historian Andrew Seaton. Also that week, a one-off documentary The NHS at 75: Covid Memories will reflect on the pandemic through the experience of health service staff.

On 5 July, the NHS will celebrate its 75th anniversary. To coincide, a special series of programming across the BBC spanning BBC Radio 4, BBC News and Radio 5 Live will take the temperature of the national health service to consider what the future might look like for the NHS’s huge workforce and the patients who rely on it. Blair claimed (incorrectly) in 1998 that Britain was ‘one of the few countries where they feel your pulse before they feel your wallet if you collapse in the street’.

Online

As part of his Leverhulme Fellowship, Andrew is researching a second project in environmental history, provisionally titled The Ends of Coal: Living with British Carbon. This work is a wide-ranging history of the British coal industry in the twentieth century, exploring its legacies on human health, pollution, decolonisation, political economy, and environmentalism. Selected publications Andrew has discussed his research on BBC Radio 4's 'Start the Week', BBC Radio 5 Live, the HistoryExtra podcast, and The Majority Report. He has delivered large public lectures at Mansfield College, Oxford and Newcastle University, as well as smaller talks at bookstores, libraries, and literary festivals. A provocative, deeply-researched explanation of how the NHS—seemingly in perpetual crisis—has endured over the past 75 years. Seaton’s study is an important corrective to overarching accounts of the triumph of neoliberalism in Britain, a testament to the power of unintended consequences in policy-making, and a must-read about the strange survival of social democracy and everyday communalism into the twenty-first century”.