The government is peddling a new line about the health service. In précis, it is this: individual experience of the NHS is very good; it’s just our overall impression of it that’s poor. I’ve heard it from Patricia Hewitt and Andy Burnham, minister for delivery and quality at the Department of Health, but it’s like an Arctic Monkeys song – if you listen to the radio long enough you’ll hear it from everybody.
What a silver bullet it is, this conspiratorial, wink-wink blame-the-media rhetoric. “If it were just you and me,” it leans over and whisp ers to the electorate, “we’d be getting along fam ously.” It’s really hilariously sleazy; it’s been adapted from a saloon bar. And yet it sticks. I put the NHS notion, con versationally, to a retired civil servant, latterly of the DoH, and she said exactly the same: if we’re taking positive experiences away, and transmuting them into a negative impression, that must be the fault of media.
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