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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator. Each week we take a look at some

of the most important and intriguing stories from the issue and the writers behind them.

I'm William Moore, the Spectators Features Editor. This week, is the current NHS

crisis a bug or a feature? Plus, how is the nation feeling about the Omicron variant?

And finally, now it's December, can we open the Bayleys? First up, in the Spectator's cover story this week, our economics editor, Kate Andrews,

writes about the state of the NHS, and why even though reform is so clearly needed, it is nearly politically impossible to enact.

She joins me now with Isabel Hardman, who is currently writing a book on the history of the NHS.

Kate, you begin your article by saying that the NHS's problems are now getting so bad that

people are starting to notice. Could it not be said, though, that a lot of the problems that

you do cite in your piece, slow ambulance pickup, long waiting lists, over crowded A&Es, that

these problems, they're a knock-on

effect of the pandemic in lockdown. So much of this disruption was inevitable, was it not?

You can definitely make that case. And I think to some extent I do. The pandemic has revealed all of the

strains that the NHS was under before. And in some ways, it has taken it to breaking point.

But I think a lot of patients out there will be very familiar with the idea of the NHS being

in crisis because it doesn't necessarily take a lockdown. Every winter, we have the winter

crisis, we have wards that are genuinely overflowing, people cannot get into beds, we have cues

of ambulances, waiting

times worsen. It is new in the sense of how bad it is. We now have 5.8 million people on the

...