I would say that most people will not vote against the NHS though. They may vote to reform it or get it more money, but they will not mostly vote to get rid of it.
The NHS is an upside down version of the US healthcare system. In the UK the political system is hijacked by the population to keep doctors wages low. In the US the political system is hijacked by the healthcare industry in order to keep healthcare wages high.
Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.
>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.
56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.
>The NHS is a socialist anachronism
This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.
Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.
Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.
FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.
Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...
Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.
Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.
Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.
And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.
Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?
I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.
When Cameron first called the referendum Remain was in the lead. When topics are debated thoroughly in the public sphere and serious campaigns are run, people's opinions can shift pretty dramatically. That's why politicians campaign.
Nobody has ever spent time campaigning to keep railways privatised in the UK because the Conservatives have always chosen to fight elections on other issues, whilst Labour have made nationalisation a priority for years. If people were asked to make a direct decision on this and there was competent campaigning involved, I am very sure nationalisation would lose. The arguments are weak.
87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of [the NHS]
The same poll showed even more people are "proud" of the fire brigade, although there's nothing special about the British fire service. They are also more "proud" of the post office than Oxford or Cambridge universities. All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.
Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS. The Conservatives have, for now at least, given up trying to debate it because they prefer to be a centrist party and because Labour consistently exploit people's emotions by conflating the NHS with healthcare. For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses and loving of cancer, or other nonsense.
They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.
It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.
>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses
They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.
Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.
> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.
You just wrote above:
> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.
> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model
Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.
2) left wing journalists? For what newspaper? The UK newspaper industry is dominated by right wing papers. I think international readers may get there wrong idea about it because they see the guardian online... because the guardian is free it gets shared a lot. If you want to see a typical British newspaper try the Daily Mail (Don't take this as a recommendation!)
3) The idea that the Corbyn election defeat was mostly about rail nationalisation is one of the most absurd things I have ever read.
4) The businesses I work with spent trivial sums on GDPR.
>The NHS is a socialist anachronism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_cap...
Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it.
Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS.
Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices).
Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move.
But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.