Co-director of Centre for Health Policy, University of Strathclyde

On November 6, Dr Ellen Stewart is going to visit the Department of Political Science. She will give an invited lecture in the lecture series of the Department of Political Science (IPW lectures). The lecture is organized by the research group VALUE-VACC  (FWF – Austrian Science Fund START project, headed by Katharina T. Paul) in cooperation with CeSCoS (Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity).

Topic: How Britain loves the NHS: solidarity and ‘the healthcare discrepancy’

Date: November 6, 17:00

Location: Conference Room (Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstr. 7, 2nd floor, Trakt A, University of Vienna, Department of Political Science)

Quantitative studies of public opinion have argued that there is a ‘healthcare discrepancy’ (Bambra, 2005) in public attitudes to welfare state spending: population attitudes towards spending on healthcare diverge from those towards other welfare state functions. This is attributed to factors including the socio-cultural status of medicine in societies, and to the less stigmatised character of ill-health compared to conditions such as poverty or unemployment. In How Britain Loves the NHS (Stewart, 2023) I offer an analysis of this phenomenon in the UK context, where the socio-cultural significance of the NHS has grown sharply in recent years. This is often seen as problematic because the NHS becomes a proxy for exclusionary nationalist sentiment (Fitzgerald, Hinterberger, Narayan, & Williams, 2020), but also because public support for the NHS might encourage politicians to protect NHS budgets at the expense of other public services which might prevent ill-health. This paper discusses not how much the British public loves the NHS, but the modalities and dimensions of that affection. I consider how public affection for the NHS might be conceptualised, not as a vampiric threat to the wider welfare state, but as a valuable exemplar of how public services might act as solidarity-generating machines within society.