Britons Are Beginning To Admit It: Their Beloved National Health Service Is Broken |
Health Care
Reem Ibrahim | 1.2.2026 7:45 AM
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........