The Political Economy of the British National Health Service, 1945–1975: Opportunities and Constraints?

Abstract

The National Health Service (NHS) has often been regarded, by both academic commentators and the public, as the centrepiece of Britain's welfare state. It has retained a high degree of popularity, and politicians have had to take account of this, privately and publicly. So, for example, in the late 1950s a leading Conservative observed that the electorate might accept cuts in defence spending: “But meddle with National Health? That's political suicide.” A quarter of a century later Margaret Thatcher felt obliged to declare at the Conservative Party annual conference that “the National Health Service is safe with us”. The Labour Party has been particularly keen to associate itself with the NHS, playing on its central role in the service's creation. At the 2001 general election, for instance, the manifesto of the Scottish Labour Party proclaimed that: “For over 50 years, the NHS has been part and parcel of what it means to be British. Its foundations—tax-based funding and care according to need—remain as valid today as ever.” In doing so, it stressed the service's founding principles alongside the assertion that it is a central component of British identity.