I was born in 1946, two years before the NHS was established. My parents had a great reverence for public health systems, doctors, nurses, and those who worked in them. As I was growing up, I was taught that the NHS was something we had fought for. There were horrors in the 1930s: people scraping and saving for healthcare or not going to the doctor because they didn’t have the money. Now that I think about it, a tragedy happened to my parents. They lost a child in 1945, and the way my father used to say it to me was, ‘He died of whooping cough; it was during the war and they didn’t have the medicines.’ In retrospect, to some extent, it would have been because we didn’t have the NHS.

In terms of their background, my father came from a family that back to my great-grandfather had been active in what was called the Bund, the Jewish Workers’ League. It was founded in Poland, but when it came to Britain and America, where it was particularly active, it had a secular non-political wing, which is called the Arbeter Ring or Workers Circle. It had a building in the East End of London that became the Half Moon Theatre. There was also a building just behind the Hackney Empire. My mother’s father belonged to the Workers Circle in Hackney. So on both sides of my family, there were people engaged in this radical Jewish movement at various levels. My parents joined the Communist Party around 1936, at the time of the Battle of Cable Street and then left in 1957. So they were in it for twenty-one years.

They had a way of talking about education, health, welfare, and the nationalised industries, which then were coal, rail, and steel, as well as the Co-op, as if they were things that belonged to us. When I was growing up, I used to toddle off to the Co-op, handing over the divi [dividend] number. I always had a sense that these things belonged to us. We’d be listening to the radio and if they were talking about the health service, there was just a sense that it was ours and that this was a good thing. It had been won by the struggle which led to the Labour government in 1945. Then again, I think I felt a bit the same about Arsenal. Some of these things get blurred for a 10-year-old! But people talk a lot about a sense of belonging to the UK. For some, it’s about the monarchy and things like that. If you were brought up in a family like mine, it was the Co-op, the nationalised industries, and the NHS.

When I first got active in politics, in my teens and twenties, the major issues were the Vietnam War, the fight against Enoch Powell, anti-racism. The NHS wasn’t really a focus, but, in some ways, this was ironic because throughout that time I was suffering from a chronic illness. In 1981, when I was 35, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. There I was in hospital getting incredible treatment, and I thought about this diagnosis of a very tricky illness and then having free medicines for the rest of my life. It’s a replacement therapy: you basically have pills that substitute for your thyroid gland.

When I talk about this to Americans or people on a private health service, they’re amazed. The idea that you could be chronically ill and it’s handled for free, it seems extraordinary. That obviously has continued since I was 35. Here I am, 77. And just to add to it, my wife, Emma, and our children also have hypothyroidism. So all four of us are receiving that free healthcare. We hardly think about it.

I actually briefly went to Middlesex Hospital Medical School and studied medicine for a couple of years. But before that, when I was 17, I was knocked down in the road. I was in hospital for eight weeks and then two weeks in a rehabilitation centre, all for free. I can remember the ward clearly. I was in orthopaedic and there were young blokes about my age who had mostly had road accidents. They were bikers. There was an extraordinary mix of cultures. This was 1962 and I can clearly remember that many of the nurses and doctors were from outside Britain: Danish, Jamaican, African. There was a guy in the corner that the charge nurse kindly seemed to allow to stay there. He was a First World War veteran. He wore his medals on his dressing gown and told us stories. I mean, it seems incredible now that I think about it. Within twenty yards of him, there were blokes who wanted to talk about Elvis and being bikers.

The NHS has always had this incredible staff but the melting pot is also the patients. If you have a private system, well, more and more people get separated out. With a public system, you have a sense that we are in this together, so you get a commonality through illness, disease, and accidents that you might not otherwise have. It’s possible to live in a bubble of PLU — people like us. To some extent we all do, of course, but when you are ill, it’s quite interesting how quickly you aren’t amongst PLU. It’s an important experience.

Yes. I’ll just say that an enormous amount of what you are talking about here — life, death, that moment, that border, whether you are going to now or when it is, and my attitudes to it — is informed by people from the NHS. I did two years of medical training, and, of course, that was totally imbued with a vision of the NHS. You develop an attitude to the mind and body — once you’re getting into handling a cadaver, studying physiology — that’s scientific. That formation taught me to be quite medical about my attitudes to life and death.

It was laid particularly in those two years and then reinforced by the way in which my mother died. She had two horrible years dealing with cancer. It may be that there are treatments now that might have saved her that weren’t available then. They were doing a mixture of surgery and radiotherapy. Incredible care, but they couldn’t save her. I think it’s important to understand yourself as a living creature in relation to medicine, so that it’s not mystified.

When I fell ill with Covid, a friend who’s a GP stuck an oximeter on me. Well, she gave it to my wife, Emma. Emma called out the number 58 and Dr Katie thought it was my pulse. Emma said, ‘No, no, no. His pulse is 115.’ It turned out, 58 was the lowest number they had seen in a person still conscious. I was already a bit woozy with hypoxia and said, ‘What? I can’t get downstairs.’ Dr Katie wasn’t having it, so Emma drove me straight there and I was whisked into intensive care. I did all right for a few days but then had a conversation with the doctor. I admire his bluntness. He said, ‘Will you sign this piece of paper to let us put you to sleep?’ I said, ‘Will I wake up?’ And he said, ‘You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance.’ I said, ‘And if I don’t sign?’ He said, ‘Zero.’ I like that. I like that. It is classic non-bullsh*t.

That estimate that he made wasn’t far off. In my ICU, 42 percent of us died. He was only 8 percent out. I ended up spending forty days and forty nights in a coma, which is a bit biblical, and forty-eight days in ICU. The NHS, those doctors and nurses, saved my life. There’s no two ways about it. If I hadn’t had that combination of induced coma and intubation, and then later a tracheostomy, this conversation wouldn’t be taking place. I was a goner.

During the period when I was unconscious, the nurses kept a patient diary. I find it very emotional to talk about it. This is the thing that amazes me and upsets me the most. These workers were doing eight-hour shifts under the most incredibly difficult conditions, dressed in improvised PPE, secondhand PPE; on one occasion, a set of secondhand PPE came in with blood on it. These were the conditions that nurses were working in at this moment, your absolute emergency moment in the NHS. And they were taking time to write a diary, these nurses, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists. It was a symbolic example of what the NHS can do in terms of loving care and fighting to keep this bloke alive.

The nurses wrote things like, ‘We shaved you; I know you don’t like that,’ or ‘I notice you support Arsenal. You didn’t seem very impressed that I support Derby.’ Lovely jokes like that. Singing me ‘happy birthday’ around my bed, filming it, putting it on FaceTime so that my family could see it. I was inert; there was no patient going, ‘Oh, thank you, that’s lovely, my wife will bring in a box of choccies.’ There was just this slab of bloke sitting there with tubes going in and out. Those nurses had to do all the dirty stuff, you believe me, clearing the pads out from under me. But they took out the time for that too.

Of course, they were also put under unnecessary stress because the NHS wasn’t supported and trusted during all of this. I’ve met some of the nurses since who were in my ward. Many have found it incredibly difficult. They are going through a form of PTSD, suffering nightmares from the stress of the pandemic. We have to be careful using military metaphors, but it was much like the horrors that people in wartime face. They faced enormous amounts of death on a daily basis. There were only eleven bays in my ward; it was expanded to twenty-four in the same space. The nurses were going between two, three, four patients sometimes. They say that in one of the letters. And if you leave an intensive care patient, you might be leaving them at the moment they’re experiencing a crisis, but someone else’s crisis is more critical.

Some of my fellow patients were copping it because of clotting, and the hospitals were only just discovering that blood clots were forming because of Covid. There were people dying of suffocation due to a cytoplasm storm, a powerful immune reaction. They just couldn’t get the air into them quickly enough. It was shocking, sometimes horrific. And these medical workers are often young people, so many of them were between 22 and 30. It was an enormous burden.

I still don’t think we have found a national means to deal with that trauma. So many died, so many people, millions in fact, lost loved ones. And then there’s all of those who worked through it. Nobody has seen fit to mark it properly, apart from one small ceremony which I took part in at Westminster Abbey. They’re nervous about creating a national day or a national place. There’s an improvised place, hurrah for that, but there was no official recognition. I don’t think the monarchy or the cabinet were there, certainly no leading figures. The representatives of the major religions were [there], to their credit. If it had been a war in which 200,000 died, there would have been recognition.

I read the letters back to the nurses at the Royal College of Nursing National Congress. Probably almost all of those who were there had been involved. I didn’t really speak. I just read those letters back. It was my tribute to them.

I still remember how extraordinary it was to come out of that coma. It goes on for so long that, when you do emerge, you’re what’s called ‘deconditioned’. Nothing is really working and you can’t stand up or walk. There were two possible routes. One was to go home and try to have physiotherapy; the other was to go to a rehab hospital. So I spent three weeks in St Pancras Rehabilitation [Unit]. They said, ‘At the end of these weeks, you’ll walk.’ I just thought they were joking, but the combination of incredible care from physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nurses, and doctors got me there in the end.

In the rehabilitation hospital, next to me, in that ward, there were people [who] didn’t have a penny to scratch together. There was a guy from the Caribbean, a Grenadian bloke, and there was an Irish guy, who couldn’t speak. His wife would call him and she had this incredible monologue. The nearest I could describe [her is as] Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses. She would talk about his life and how the home he was in before was terrible, and this hospital was much better, and then she would stop in the middle and ask if he agreed. ‘Is that a yes, Jimmy? Is that a yes?’ And then he couldn’t say, so we’d all shout ‘Yes’ from the other side of the ward, and she’d go, ‘Thank you. Thank you. So that’s a yes, that’s a yes,’ and all he could do was nod.

Then, in the ward, just opposite me, there was a guy I had been talking to. Just before he left, I asked him where his name came from and he said that his parents were Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia. I said, ‘We could have been talking about this!’ Then he said something extraordinary. He said that his mother had been involved in the Unity Theatre which, as some Tribune readers will know, was the left-wing theatre that my parents used to go to. I said, ‘Your mother was in it? My parents probably saw your mum in shows.’ ‘I’ve got to go now,’ [he said] and off he went. He’s the one who had the best gag of my whole stay. It was when the nurse came and said, ‘Peter, your urine is dark,’ and he said, ‘The times are dark.’

It’s frightening. I’ve seen the American system at work. I’ve got American friends, American relatives, and I talk to them. We know that there are people in government and maybe even in the opposition who go across to the States in order to learn from their model. You think, ‘Hang on a minute. We invented this wonderful thing. We have a beloved public system. Why are we going over there to learn about what they do?’

Especially when we know about the horrors: the uninsured, the lack of facilities in poorer areas, the medical bankruptcy, and the stress of these enormous bills.

The NHS was built on the basis that we’re all in it together. It shouldn’t be about dishing out public money to shareholders. If I’m a shareholder in a private healthcare company, I’m not doing it because I particularly care about health. I’m just hoping for those 4, 5, 6 percent returns on my shares. That money could and should be spent on improving the healthcare of everyone. We hear that they can’t improve the NHS, can’t improve infrastructure, can’t hire more workers, can’t pay them decent. And yet these millions are being drained from the system towards private profit. That was never Aneurin Bevan’s vision. [It was], as you say, to use the NHS to build a more equal society.

I’m very bitter. What can you say more about somebody than they’ve saved your life? Those doctors and nurses in the hospitals, those rehab people that taught me to walk, I don’t know how to describe the gratitude I have for them. These are the greatest things we can do for each other. It’s so wonderful; it’s so far away from war and greed and violence. It’s caring for each other as human beings. Yet somehow, it’s a low priority.

People clapped, I believe, because they loved the NHS. They are not responsible for wages and conditions. That is on the government, which has overseen a policy of wage caps for workers across the NHS. We hear that it’s unaffordable to have a proper public health system. But it’s apparently sustainable to have a society where people suffer or die because it’s not funded properly. These are all political decisions. They’ve made political decisions about health workers’ pay and how much money they’re prepared to spend on the health service. They’ve made political decisions, both the Tories and Labour, with PFI [Private Finance Initiative] before them, about privatising chunks of it.

Imagine yourself being a canny capitalist in Dragons’ Den thinking, ‘Should I invest in the NHS?’ The first question you would ask is, ‘Well, what are my returns?’ It’s not, ‘Are they good syringes?’ It’s not, ‘Will the services be effective? Will I clear the refuse out equally from poor people’s wards and rich people’s wards?’ I’d be horrified to think that is how the NHS might end up one day.