Hello and welcome to this special Spectator podcast, 74 years of the NHS past and present.

I'm Isabel Hardman and we're going to be doing this in association with Abbe, who we're very grateful to for this podcast.

Well, as the NHS reaches its 75th anniversary next year,

the service has never been under greater strain.

The pandemic has created record waiting lists

of almost seven million in England alone.

Every month, tens of thousands of accident and emergency patients are left to wait

for more than 12 hours, with ambulances queuing up outside. Other long-term challenges, such as an

ageing population, are also coming to a head. Now on this episode, we're taking a long view.

We're going right back over the history of the service,

right back to the beginning and to more recent events in the past few decades to talk about

what the NHS was founded for. Why is it struggling now? What are the improvements and support

it desperately needs? And I'm joined by an absolutely stellar panel of podcast speakers.

I have Alan Milburn, the former Secretary of State for Health in the new Labour government.

I have Anne Milton, former Minister for Health, the former Deputy Chief Whip for the Conservative Party,

and Philip Schwab, who currently serves as the area director for government affairs for Western Europe

and Canada for Abfi. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And to kick off, I'll come to you

first, Alan, your understanding of the way in which the health service has changed from its original

founding principles and how perhaps you saw that in action when you were

Health Secretary?

Well, the NHS was the product of a particular era, you know, the post-war era, and it was a time,

curiously, of both pessimism and optimism. You know, pessimism because of what had happened

...