The problem with socialist healthcare is that pretty soon you run out of everyone else's hospitals

A political party (shhh, no names!) is running a campaign based on how many babies the NHS has delivered. So, plugging my birth date into the calculator, something based upon census records, I find out that I’m the “10,723,296th BABY TO BE BORN ON THE NHS!” which is, I am sure we all agree, terribly exciting. Torbay General for the completists, out of Seaview in Strete.

Something else I know about the NHS. The first hospital to be actually built by the NHS opened in July 1963, the QE II one in Welwyn Garden City. So while I was indeed the 10.7 millionth baby delivered by the NHS that all happened 4 months before the NHS actually added, at all, to the medical infrastructure of the country.

For the creation of the NHS was simply the nationalisation, without compensation, of all medical facilities within the country. Which is, I think we can all agree, a little different from the idea generally put forward, which is that medical care only started with the NHS? Something that there is a familial memory of, given that the grandfather so interested in that first grandson was a GP, the grandmother equally interested a practice nurse.

But it is still interesting, isn’t it? These claims that the national debt was 200% of GDP when we started the NHS - so therefore we can achieve anything we want if we’re prepared to want it. The idea that it only used to cost 1% of GDP in fact.

Well, yes, but the problem with socialist medicine is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ hospitals.