The day after the United Kingdom’s general election last year, newly appointed Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting proclaimed that Britain’s socialized health care system was “broken.”
Streeting’s statement, while certainly correct, would have been political suicide just a few years ago. Criticism of the National Health Service (NHS) has long been seen as heretical. As in other religions, heretics were judged not on the merit of their criticism, but on the mere fact that they dared challenge received wisdom. As former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson put it in 1992, “The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion.”
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we were encouraged to stand outside our homes and “clap for the NHS” every Thursday. Some overly excited clappers even decided that wasn’t quite enough to show their adoration for our health care system, and so out came the pots, pans, spoons, and other kitchen utensils.
Criticism of the NHS has remained extremely taboo. When I suggested in 2023 that the NHS was perhaps not the best health care system in the world, the left-wing tabloid paper The Mirror ran two stories about my “shocking” views. I even received death threats.
And yet, in just a few years, the Overton window appears to have shifted. The idea that the NHS isn’t the world’s best health care system is becoming more and more politically acceptable. Recent polling by YouGov suggests that more Brits now believe the NHS provides worse health care than other European countries, with the percentage increasing from 16 percent in 2019 to about 27 percent in 2025. The British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 2024, just one in five adults (21 percent) were “very” or “quite” satisfied with the way the NHS runs. This is a steep decline of 39 percentage points since 2019, and marks the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since the survey began in 1983.
Perhaps the various high-profile stories of shockingly poor NHS treatment have driven some of this change. Nowhere is this more striking than in the Lucy Letby case.
Letby, a 35-year-old NHS nurse, was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital from June 2015 through June 2016. Her prosecution was subject to countless debates, with many people claiming she was actually innocent. Leading the media defence of Letby was journalist Peter Hitchens, who claims the babies were not murdered but died because they were “already very ill and received inadequate treatment.”
How can we not tell the difference between serial baby murder and normal NHS care?
Hellbound and Down 