Book: NHS Under Siege – the fight to save it in the age of Covid

Description

The NHS is in crisis. The past 12 years of Tory real-terms cuts in funding have been disastrous. In this brand-new book with a foreword by Michael Rosen, John Lister and Jacky Davis look at the threat to the NHS posed by the combination of two years of a global pandemic and the relentless policies of the Tory-led governments since 2010.

At the end of 2019 the NHS and other public services were already in crisis as a result of a decade of Conservative austerity policies. They were thus in no fit state to face the challenges of a global pandemic. As a result, the UK suffered a shockingly high death rate – 180,000 people have died from Covid at the time of writing, the equivalent of a commercial airliner crashing every day for the past 2 years.

Why were public services already struggling when the pandemic struck? Why did a country with a world-famous NHS and public health system do so badly? Why did the government turn away from public services and waste money on an inept and expensive private sector? Those who lost loved ones, those who laboured on the front line without adequate resources, we all deserve answers to these and other important questions.