We’ve heard it said many times in recent years that Britain is ‘broken’, always as if either New Labour or the Tories under Thatcher (depending on your point of view) were responsible for the fractures in modern society. But the truth is that Britain has been broken for a long time. It’s arguable there has never been a time during modernity when it was actually fixed; hence Thatcher’s comment about there being ‘no such thing as society’.
But politicians cannot fix the country. Rather it’s a case of ‘physician heal thyself’. Mending Britain will take a change of thinking, and acting, by a whole nation of people. For it is the people, not the state that is the real National Health Service, and it’s high time we got up off our backsides and started working together towards this goal