NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care

Forty years ago, when on a gap year in a remote secondary school in post-colonial Ghana, I was summoned by the headmaster and informed that we had in our library a book the government didn't think we should read. It must therefore be taken out into the bush and burned. Curiously, he suggested the boy for the job, a junior member of the library committee. So I handed both our dog eared copies of Animal Farm to young Kwesi, who nodded thoughtfully and took them away. I never saw them again, but somehow Orwell's fable of Soviet Russia became instantly famous within the school: a cultish clandestine “must read,” passed in secret round the dormitories and quoted and laughed over at breaks—a powerful and brightly topical polemic in a darkening political landscape.

Allyson M Pollock

Verso, £15.99, pp 271 ISBN 1 84467 011 2

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Of course such things could never happen here, but the most gripping section in NHS plc, Allyson Pollock's defence of an NHS under political onslaught, describes her experience in November 2001 …