DHave you ever wondered whether the British are a fundamentally unserious people? I do, although I must emphasize that I include myself in this; a completely trivial person whose “professional” life takes place mostly in the craziest corners of an internet that long ago destroyed my capacity for collective thinking.
But if you have any intellectual rigor, it must be disturbing, given the hegemony of Hun culture, voting for politicians purely based on their potential, expressing dissent through the throwing of milkshakes, expressing dissent opinions through the disposal of milkshakes. endlessly amused by our own social awkwardness and regard Gemma Collins as a kind of philosopher-savant. It may all be ironic, but that doesn’t make it any better. I continue to expect Melvyn Bragg to defect and seek asylum in the Sorbonne.
I thought of this when I read the responses to the NHS idea-generating Change project. Launched last week and described as a “national conversation” and “a rallying cry to the nation,” the Change the NHS website provides a platform for the British public to contribute views and ideas on how the NHS can be fixed.
You can probably imagine the kinds of highlights picked out by eagle-eyed readers before moderators ruined the fun. Get out your British banter bingo card and floats: put a Wetherspoon’s in every hospital? Finch. Make Larry the Cat Minister of Health? Finch. Fire Wes Streeting from a cannon (even though he played along with the Wetherspoon suggestion and claimed it was “unfortunately vetoed by the Chancellor“)? Finch. Anger management guidance for GP receptionists? Absolute. Make it the ‘Northern Health Service and ensure others get their own healthcare’? Finch. Call it ‘NHSy McNHS Face’? Bingo!
While browsing the site I came across a few more. Someone suggested a Frequent Patient Program, where the most dedicated participants could “earn quirky prizes, like honorary hospital gowns or gold-plated tongue depressors.” Streeting, said another, should do an Undercover Boss NHS show to generate ‘heartwarming anecdotes’. Other proposals included adding a ‘leap hour’ between 8am and 8.01am ‘so everyone has time to book their GP appointments’ and running Coldplay through hospital speakers to avoid delayed discharges (who are we targeting here, the patients or staff? collateral damage?).
Sometimes it is difficult to know whether contributions are a joke, a modest proposal, a satire or deadly serious. Food court-style buzzers for emergency rooms sound nice, but unworkable. One wag suggested exercise bikes in waiting rooms, which patients could pedal to generate electricity, with health and energy-saving benefits, with the most powerful pedalers able to “get to their appointments quickly”. “Let patients vote each other out of the department” sounds like something that could be successfully televised and become a powerful revenue generator. “I have a solution: wolves” one entry he said succinctly, if mysteriously, quoting the Guardian’s George Monbiot.
Some of the suggestions are definitely serious, but you wish they weren’t. A depressing number of people support punishing “lifestyle diseases,” the most sinister kind of slippery slope. Then there are those who think the NHS should look like a feel-good Sunday night TV series, apparently longing for a time when doctors smoked pipes, wore tweed and cycled around to cure your shell shock with a pep talk and an arrowroot biscuit. They want sanatoriums, cottage hospitals, and parish nurses; clear hierarchical uniforms and “honey still for tea”. There’s the predictable grab bag of personal crusades: “bin-diversity” (an anti-woke rallying cry, not one for more dumpsters), scrap fumes, vending machines and “IT” (what, all of them?); outlaw unions; legalize cannabis; make “foreigners” pay; somehow stop people from eating Greggs.
The cumulative effect, as you scroll, may be that you agree the contributor which demands that the website itself be removed because “it radicalises people against universal suffrage”. But I’ll tell you what: there are a lot of reactions; at the time of writing, more than 5,000. And after going through many of them, they may not all be accurate or sensible (or even sensible), but the cumulative conclusion is that people really do care. That the NHS still feels like quite a serious, important thing to many of us. A matter of life and death, in fact.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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