Have you ever wondered if the British are a fundamentally unserious people? I do, although I must stress that I include myself in this; a completely trivial person whose ‘professional’ life is largely played out in the most inane corners of an internet that has long since destroyed my capacity for collective thought.
But if you are of any intellectual rigour, it must be disturbing, given the hegemony of Hun culture, voting for politicians purely on the basis of their potential, expressing disagreement by throwing milkshakes, expressing dissent by throwing milkshakes away, endlessly amused by our own social awkwardness, and regarding Gemma Collins as some kind of philosopher-savant. It may all be ironic, but that doesn’t make it any better. I still expect Melvyn Bragg to desert and seek asylum at the Sorbonne.
I thought of this when I read the responses to the NHS Idea Generation for Change project. The Change the NHS website launched last week and has been described as a “national conversation” and “a rallying cry to the nation”. It provides the British public with a platform to share their views and ideas on how to fix the NHS.
You can probably imagine the highlights that were picked out by astute readers before moderators spoiled the fun. Get out your British bingo card and floats: a Wetherspoon in every hospital? Finch. Make Larry the Cat Health Secretary? Finch. Fire Wes Streeting with a cannon (despite playing along with the Wetherspoon suggestion, claiming it was “sadly rejected by the Chancellor”)? Finch. Anger management guidelines for GP receptionists? Absolutely. Make it the ‘Northern Health Service and make sure others get their own healthcare’? Finch. Call it ‘NHSy McNHS Face’? Bingo!
I came across a few more as I browsed the site. One suggested a Frequent Patient Programme, where the most dedicated participants could earn “odd prizes like honorary hospital gowns or gold-plated tongue depressors.” Streeting, said another, should create an Undercover Boss NHS show to generate “heart-warming anecdotes.” Other proposals included adding a “leap hour” between 8am and 8.01am “so everyone has time to book a GP appointment” and playing Coldplay over hospital loudspeakers to prevent delayed discharges (who are we targeting here, the patients or the staff? collateral damage?).
Sometimes it’s hard to know whether contributions are a joke, a modest suggestion, a satire or deadly serious. Food court-style buzzers in emergency rooms sound fun but unworkable. One joker suggested exercise bikes in waiting rooms, which patients could pedal to generate electricity, with health and energy-saving benefits, with the most powerful pedalers “getting to their appointments quickly.” “Let patients vote each other out of the ward” sounds like something that could be successfully televised and become a powerful source of income. “I have a solution: wolves,” he said succinctly but mysteriously, quoting The Guardian’s George Monbiot.
Some of the suggestions are certainly serious, but you wish they weren’t. A depressing number of people are in favor of 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 sitcom, who seem to yearn for a time when doctors smoked pipes, wore tweeds 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 more bins), scrap fumes, vending machines and “IT” (what, all of them?); outlaw unions; legalise cannabis; make “foreigners” pay; somehow stop people eating Greggs.
The cumulative effect, as you scroll, may be that you agree with the contributor who demands that the site itself be taken down because “it radicalises people against universal suffrage”. But I’ll tell you: there are a lot of comments; at the time of writing, over 5,000. And having read through many of them, they may not all be accurate or sensible (or even sensible), but the cumulative conclusion is that people do care. That the NHS still feels like a pretty serious, important issue to many of us. A matter of life and death, in fact.