I’m struggling as the political news gets worse every day. It’s no fun being proved right, as Cassandra found out. Remember, they all told her to stop being negative and look at the wonderful acts of kindness and generosity right in front of her. And then, boom, a thousand Greeks came out of a horse’s arsehole and slit everyone’s throats. And that, my friends, is a better fate than what awaits the NHS.
More myth, ritual, ideology
The mythologies are increasing. The Dad’s Army cosiness of the elderly retired Colonel puttering up and down his garden to ‘raise money for the NHS’. The perfect mythic resonance - Second World War, already a myth. Add this to the existing myth, more resonance, more mythologising. Joe Wicks ‘raising money for the NHS’ - on every TV, every newsfeed.
The chilling weekly religious ritual of clapping in the street for the NHS - simply to show others in the street we ‘care.’ (What, are there nurses everywhere walking down the street? Is it for them? Don’t forget people started doing this in other countries to clap for actual heath workers who were walking past.) A spontaneous act of appreciation has been co-opted as a tool by those in power to reassure you, to ensure that you are thinking right, ‘thinking of others’, being good. Don’t question. Don’t act. Its institutionalisation, its aestheticisation, its mythologisation, its ideologisation as a form of ritual, is a tool of control, of developing groupthink. Boris Johnson’s doorstep Thursday ritual is a two-fingered salute to the money, investment, to any kind of strategy to undo the endless damage caused to the service over the last 10 years.
Raising money: why charity?
So everyone is ‘raising money for the NHS.’
TELL ME: What are they raising money for? What will it pay for? What IS this ‘NHS’ they are raising money for? WHY are they raising money for a service paid for and publicly funded by taxation?
And £20m? What will that pay for? Why is the Government so pleased about this when it is a drop in the ocean?
The answer is: because it will help to end its funding by taxation. Of course, (I presume) that is not Colonel Tom’s intention. But it sure as shit is that of the mainstream press, the politicians, the people who profit from public sector dissolution. The slow, strategic, turn of our conception of that institution, of how we view, conceive, believe in that thing, is exactly why this has the hegemonic legs it has.
As I warned before: this appeal to human charity; this turning of the virus into a story of titanic human struggle against cruel and capricious nature, is very quickly coming to sit alongside a story of things that ‘simply must be done to protect and save the NHS. That thing we all agree we love and venerate, right?’
Here’s how it goes:
Privatise the NHS to ‘help save it’
Ration treatment to ‘ensure it isn’t overwhelmed’
Get the ‘support’ of big business to make it more ‘efficient’ and ‘protect it’ - from itself
This is the Orwellian doublespeak that has served the neoliberal right for decades - ‘saving Medicare for future generations’ was Gingrich-era doublespeak for cutting medicare in the US.
The charity trap
“Ooh Cecily, I had a simply maaaaarvellous time looking at the poor people in my hospital. Isn’t it wonderful to think my 0.000000001% of my income made such a huge difference the three people they were able to treat? Now let’s eat a swan.”
The whole nation is walking into a trap. The more people choose, with their donations, with their Facebook likes or cuddle emojis, to normalise the idea that the NHS is some heroic voluntaristic enterprise built on personal heroism, sacrifice, and generosity, the quicker it dies. Because charity relies on voluntarism. But basic health care to avoid your population drowning in in their own lung fluid cannot be voluntaristic.
When people portray this as a great step forward, and a sign of our community coming together, can I ask you: what do you think was there before the NHS?
The answer is: the Dowager Countess giving silvery nothings to a little local hospital that treated the deserving poor, as long as she was on the Board, and got the recognition she wanted. And chose who got treated. That is where we are now headed.
There are far more recent precedents: the ‘Big Society’ spoke about voluntarism and charity and community activism, but was simply a way in for massive private sector providers. ‘Any willing provider’ was said to be charities and local community groups. Bollocks. It was SERCO and Reed and ‘social businesses’ such as A4E. ‘Big Society’ meant ‘Shrinking State’.
Guess what’s in the news
And so we see in the Guardian that the UK government is ’using pandemic to transfer NHS duties to private sector’. ‘Critics claim Matt Hancock has accelerated dismantling of state healthcare’ (The Guardian, Mon 4 May 2020 20.25 BST)
The Tory government is trying to give all its vital new test and trace contracts to SERCO - and refusing to reinstate the public health departments they gutted in 2010 that would have been the first line support from the start of the crisis. (You know, the experts in epidemiology….)
So while they’ve been praising NHS key workers to the hilt, they’re actually further privatising it. Which goes to show exactly what I was saying: the myths are deliberate attempts to obscure the political reality with trans-historical sentimental bullshit. And the classic - and this is the sadistic, mendacious strategy of Dominic ‘Thanatos’ Cummings - is that the population are willingly, nay gleefully, collaborating, and accelerating this process.
’Community,’ not ’Society’; Sentiment, not Social Justice
“Marie Curie is closer to our NHS workers than Florence Nightingale. She died horribly from an entirely preventable disease due to a lack of PPE too.”
But neither is a substitue for a social democracy.
Meanwhile, as I said: Boris Johnson’s illness, the clapping in the street, all of this will be used to hide, and eventually directly to justify, the dismantling and privatisation of the NHS. And the gross sentimentalisation - the rainbows in windows, the schmaltzy TV music, the we-are-all-in-this-together nonsense, the enduring Florence Nightingale mythology (actually Marie Curie is closer - she died horribly from an entirely preventable disease due to lack of PPE at work too), is a fig leaf, a mask, a grinning, gurning shit-eating smile as you stick the knife in the heart of the people of the UK.
Even more chillingly, what seems to me to be happening is a classic Thatcherite switcheroo: ‘community’ in place of society. Remember Thatcher’s ‘Care in the Community’? Another morsel of Orwellian doublespeak. Nothing to do with care. Nothing to do with community. From a person who emphatically and avowedly did not believe in society. Highlight and foreground community; highlight and foreground ‘care’ - stick a cuddle emoji on it - and hey presto, you gut mental heath services and slash the NHS. The Tories have long form in dismantling society and replacing with community - by which they mean, Capital.
Globally, we are seeing a sentimentalisation that obscures an enduring lack of genuine social care, and sometimes, obvious and wilful escalation of social injustice (in the US especially). It is the mythology of care that stands in place of giving a shit about anyone but yourself; the sentimentality that stands in place of society, that is the real virus. It will kill many, many people.
So, what’s the answer?
Well, it’s too late for now. You have 5 years of this at least. There may be very little left after that.
But we can only stop voting for these grotesques, these parasites, these predatory beasts.
And all the good will in the world - the Colonel, the hot TV exercise presenter, the people who genuinely do believe that we need a more equitable society that actually cares about people - is no good if everyone votes for the people who have happily let thousands of vulnerable British citizens perish for want of a bit of cash.
So when you next have a choice: Don’t give your money to the NHS. Pay your taxes. Give your vote.