The first show I did for GB news was on the 21st of July 2021, and the first sentence I uttered was that I felt that public confidence in the National Health Service was about to fall off a cliff.
Well, goodness gracious me, I got that one right, because the British Social Attitude Survey published this morning shows that now, when asked the question, do you have confidence in the National Health Service, the figure has fallen to 24 per cent.
And that actually is astonishing when you put it in this context. In 2010, people answering that question was 70 per cent. So confidence has completely fallen off a cliff.
Part of it, of course, is getting access to GP services. Much of it is to do with the waiting list for procedures of 7.6 million people.
Nigel Farage is astonished by NHS dissatisfaction figures
GB News
And there are some areas, such as mental health, where the numbers have simply gone into the stratosphere.
So we have a very, very major problem.
This institution that the late Nigel Lawson once said was the nearest thing we genuinely have to a state religion. Suddenly, attitudes are different.
Yet when the public are asked, would they be prepared to pay more taxes to put more money into the NHS, a lot of people, about half people, still say, yeah, just keep pumping in more money.
And yet what's not really fully understood, I've tried to tell you before, is that five years ago, we were spending about 7.5 per cent of our gross domestic product on national budget, on the National Health Service. we're now spending over 10 per cent.
So we're pumping in more and more money. And yes, of course, we have an exploding population.
And we've discussed the reasons for that many times before, but we're pumping in more and more money and yet becoming more and more dissatisfied.
So how do we turn this around? Can it be turned around? Can it get better?
Maybe, just maybe, if the figure has gone from 70 per cent to 24 per cent, maybe now is the time we can actually have a proper debate about how we reform the National Health Service.