Do you ever wonder if the British might be a fundamentally unserious people? I do, though I should stress that I include myself; a thoroughly trivial person whose “professional” life is mainly spent in the silliest corners of an internet that long ago destroyed my capacity for joined-up thinking.
Still, if you do have any intellectual rigour, it must be troubling, what with the hegemony of Hun culture, voting for politicians purely on bants potential, expressing dissent through the medium of milkshake chucking, being endlessly amused by our own social awkwardness and viewing Gemma Collins as some kind of philosopher savant. It’s all arguably ironic, but that doesn’t make it any better. I keep expecting Melvyn Bragg to defect and seek asylum in the Sorbonne.
I was thinking this as I read the responses to the NHS’s idea-generating Change project. Launched last week and described as a “national conversation” and “rallying cry to the nation”, the Change NHS website offers a platform for the British public to contribute views and ideas on how to fix the NHS.
You can probably already imagine the kind of highlights picked out by eagle-eyed readers before moderators ruined the fun. Get your British banter bingo card and dobbers out: put a Wetherspoon’s in every hospital? Tick. Make Larry the Cat the health minister? Tick. Fire Wes Streeting out of a cannon (even though he played along with the Wetherspoon’s suggestion, claiming it was “sadly vetoed by the Chancellor”)? Tick. Anger management counselling for GP receptionists? Absolutely. Make it the “Northern Health Service and make others get their own”? Tick. Call it “NHSy McNHS Face”? Bingo!
Browsing the site, I found a few more. Someone suggested a Frequent Patient Programme, where the most assiduous attenders “could earn quirky prizes like honorary hospital gowns or gold-plated tongue depressors”. Streeting, said another, should do an Undercover Boss NHS show, to generate “heartwarming anecdotes”. Other proposals included adding a “leap hour” between 08.00 and 08.01 “so that everyone has time to book their GP appointments” and piping Coldplay through hospital speakers to stop delayed discharges (who are we targeting here, the patients or staff? What of the collateral damage?).
Sometimes, it’s hard to work out if contributions are a joke, modest-proposal-adjacent satire or deadly serious. Food court-style buzzers for A&E sound fun, but unworkable. One wag suggested exercise bikes in waiting rooms, which patients could pedal to generate electricity, with health and energy saving benefits, with the most powerful pedallers “fast-tracked to their appointments”. “Allow patients to vote each other off the ward” sounds like something that could be successfully televised, becoming a powerful revenue driver. “I have a solution: wolves” one submission said, succinctly, if mysteriously, quoting the Guardian’s George Monbiot.
Some suggestions are definitely in earnest, but you wish they weren’t. A depressing number of people support penalising “lifestyle” illnesses, the most sinister kind of slippery slope. Then there are those who think the NHS should look like a Sunday evening feelgood TV series, apparently yearning for a time when doctors smoked pipes, wore tweed and cycled round to cure your shellshock with a pep talk and an arrowroot biscuit. They want sanatoriums, cottage hospitals and parish nurses; clear hierarchical uniforms and “honey still for tea”. There’s the predictable grab-bag of personal crusades: “bin diversity” (an anti-woke battle cry, not one for more waste receptacles), scrap vapes, vending machines and “IT” (what, all of it?); outlaw unions; legalise cannabis; make “foreigners” pay; somehow stop people eating Greggs.
The cumulative effect, as you scroll, may be to find yourself agreeing with the contributor who demands the website itself be deleted, because “it’s radicalising people against universal suffrage”. I tell you what, though: there are loads of comments; at the time of writing, well over 5,000. And having scrolled through many of them, they might not all be accurate or sensible (or even sane), but the cumulative conclusion is that people really care. That, for a lot of us, the NHS still feels like a pretty serious, important business. A matter of life and death, in fact.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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