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Spoke with some UK based friends today about the CV19 situation there. They
are living in another world. A world where the mistakes never happened and
the lack of PPE is merely a matter of logistics. They were so proud of
clapping the NHS on Thursdays and rainbows drawn by kids and genuinely
perplexed that we had no common ground on that topic and had barely heard
about it on the BBC.

In France the response is completely different. It's surgical. Factual.
Efficient. No room for sentiment when you are fighting a killer. And it's
working.

I just came across this little essay by Gavin Barber. It sort of sums up how
we see the UK right now.

“So, I'm getting increasingly concerned about the longer-term implications
of what might lazily be termed the "Diana-fication" of the NHS - a mass
outpouring of sentimental expression, and a sudden, rather revisionist
clutching to the national bosom, as exemplified by large-scale charity
fund-raising and public (social media) expressions of "support".

First problem with this: the NHS is not a charity. It's a national
organisation (the clue is very much in the name, here) which is and should be
publicly funded via taxation. Treating it as the subject of
seasonal/event-driven fundraising efforts undermines the long-standing,
democratically-expressed consensus that the NHS is something that everyone
should take their fair share of responsibility for funding - not something
that you sometimes choose to give money to when you're feeling particularly
soppy about nurses.

Second problem: the trend for public "celebration" brings with it an
increasingly prevalent portrayal of NHS staff as smiling, benevolent
"heroes". They do heroic things, but they're not happy amateurs who put on a
uniform when they feel like playing superheroes: they're highly trained
professionals performing a range of difficult, stressful, and sometimes
boring tasks in a variety of clinical and non-clinical roles. A
sentimentalised portrayal of NHS workers risks undermining their
professionalism.

(Aside: as others wittier and more articulate than me have pointed out, the
Thursday evening "support" events have quickly taken on a grandiose, almost
aggressive edge, in much the same way as wearing a poppy in November was once
a quietly respectful commemoration of sacrifice but is now a "my poppy's
bigger than yours so I care more about dead soldiers than you do"
competition. The public gestures of support have quickly escalated from being
a nice thing to do, into something that people are *expected* to do - to the
point where those who don't join in are on the verge of being portrayed as
granite-faced malcontents who want to see all nurses locked in a cage full of
snakes and lions and poo, despite the fact that those people might be
sleeping off a hospital nightshift or putting young kids to bed at 8pm on a
Thursday).

Why does any of this matter?, some might ask. Where's the harm in a public
upsurge of support for a vital, life-saving group of public servants?

Why it matters, I think, is because movements of this kind are, by their
nature, *transitory*. They capture the public mood at a particular moment in
time, and then that moment passes, and people move on to something else. And
we are still going to need the NHS once this is all over. (Which, by the way,
it won't be, for ages).

More than that: all this love-bombing gives the NHS and its staff a halo - a
halo with a lustre that will inevitably fade. And that is dangerous. This is
Britain. There will be a Newtonian response to all of this. A backlash. (It's
probably already started in some quarters). So, once all of the
coronavirus-driven disruption starts to fade, and the NHS is crying out for
funding in more 'normal' times, there will be those - and there will be many
of them - whose instinctive reaction will be that the NHS have had their day
in the spotlight, and should go back to being undervalued and disrespected.
"What? Them again? I gave £10 to Captain Tom and now you want me to pay more
National Insurance? Fuck that. I'm voting Tory".

Perhaps most importantly of all, throwing charity and applause at the NHS
lets the government off the hook. It leaves people thinking that,
individually and collectively, we have all "done our bit", because we gave
them a few extra quid when we were feeling totes emosh, and banged a saucepan
on a Thursday evening. Whereas the more prosaic (but much less
Instagrammable) truth is that the parlous state of the NHS is entirely
attributable to a government which has spent the last decade running it into
a state of deliberate neglect to the point where its only possible salvation
is to be sold off, bit by bit, to the likes of Richard Branson. Nationalise
the risk, privatise the profit. As ever. But, because the likes of Matt
Hancock and Boris Johnson can publicly associate themselves with a time and a
movement in which EVERYONE LOVED THE NHS, they dodge culpability for their
systematic dismantling of it.

So, you know. Show some socially distant love on a Thursday evening if you
want to. But remember that you can do far more for the NHS at the ballot box
than you ever can from your window or your social media accounts.”