Let us pray for the NHS

Why was there a service in Westminster Abbey thanking God for the NHS today? Some 1,500 NHS workers, many in uniform, packed into the Abbey along with politicians to mark 75 years of the service. As a celebration of the work those people have done, it was a good event: the Dean of Westminster, David Hoyle, paid tribute in his sermon to the ‘sheer bloody-minded persistence of tired, stressed, wonderful people in the NHS’. There were testimonies from healthcare workers who had treated sickle cell patients and children with cancer from Ukraine. And of course there were readings from Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and an address from NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard. 

This sort of service isn’t massively unusual, certainly not in the way that many of those complaining about it seem to think. Westminster Abbey hosts many such celebrations and commemorations of public moments, individuals and their service. It even had a service in 2019 marking the 50th anniversary of the continuous at-sea deterrent because God also loves the bomb as well as the NHS. This one certainly had plenty of praise for the health service itself as well as the workers: the Dean had a rather peculiar line that ‘the NHS was, and still is, a glimpse of the new heaven and new earth that is promised’. Perhaps wisely, Pritchard didn’t make such ambitious statements in her address: she very pointedly referred to the need to not gloss over where the health service had failed people. Indeed, the theme of the service was as much about how much strain the NHS is under as it was about its triumphs. 

When Starmer walked into the Abbey with shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, he received a spontaneous round of applause from the health workers sitting there. Sunak then got a rather more perfunctory clap. This was definitely not an event celebrating political endeavour.