Well... that was bollocks.
I probably don't need to tell you that 2020 was a bit of a cruddy year. The pandemic was the main problem and the gross ineptitude of many governments in handling it another. The question of whether money or human life is more highly prized was answered as governments desperately encouraged people to endanger their own lives in the name of economic activity. Perhaps more disturbing was the lengths that ordinary people will go to in order to protect their sense of routine or normality: let's not entertain all that guff about freedom, what people were protesting against was a change to their routine. I've been working from home for nine months and recognise that I'm one of the luckier people in all this, more privileged you might say, but I still feel frustrated at people being cavalier with their own lives.
Perhaps I am most sensitive to this today. I don't want to go into details, but yesterday my mother and I had to take the decision to let my father go after a very short but shockingly escalating series of health crises. I love and respect my father: with the amount of suffering he is in now, and though it seemed unthinkable a month ago, it would be the height of cruelty to keep him technically alive after all he has suffered. The doctors will administer such drugs as they can to keep him in a peaceful and painless state until he slips away. Yet I have reason to be thankful.
The doctors have been absolutely incredible. The greatest achievement in this country's bloody history is the National Health Service, not just for the sheer scale of the accomplishment but for what it says about us at our best. In recent years, the world has seen Britain at its worst: nativist, small, pompous, self-aggrandizing in its delusions. But at our best, we can be noble, generous, and caring. The National Health Service was built on the belief that we only cross the finishing line when the last of us do. The political titan behind the NHS, Nye Bevan himself, once said:
"No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means."
My father will die today, or perhaps tomorrow. He will certainly not live to see his 75th birthday on 21st January. That fills me with sadness. And yet I know that, in the height of a hundred-year pandemic, despite a decade of attacks from the worst government in living memory, they did absolutely everything in the realm of medical knowledge to save him, and when that was impossible to at least make him comfortable. And that fills me with pride. My father does not leave a legacy of unpayable hospital bills, because I and my mother and people I have never met and every British person reading this have already paid those bills. Because the National Health Service represents the very best of what Britain can be, what people, in general, can be. It represents, more than anything else, the human impulse to help others. It represents our belief, despite all of our failings, that nobody should suffer without help. Our belief that money is not more important than human life.
The NHS was built to make a better world after the fall of fascism in the twentieth century. Now, as it always does in the end, fascism has slithered back out of its cesspits and stalks abroad, warping minds and hearts. But I do not believe it will triumph in the end. Because, for all of our stupidity and self-humiliation of the last few years, the British people still love their NHS. No serious politician will ever say it should be scrapped in public. I believe this is because no matter how much you scare and confuse people into cruel and foolish decisions, at their heart people are still decent, people still believe in supporting each other. These are dark times. But the spirit of the NHS still burns strong.
Nye Bevan would proud of that spirit. So would my father. I know I am.
