NHS: inequality and incorporation

Abstract

As chief executive Simon Stevens ends his stint at the helm of England’s National Health Service (NHS), a Black health activist takes a critical look at the direction of travel on racial equality under his leadership. He argues that ‘racial democracy’, i.e., ethnic representation or diversity, has displaced the rooting out of racialised injustice and inequality. Using the example of the health service, he reveals just how the struggle against racism in institutions has been reduced under neoliberalism to a mechanical mathematics of inequality. While, simultaneously, long-discarded eugenicist and biological arguments are making an unwelcome comeback, and the ‘hostile environment’, ushered in by New Labour when Stevens was a health adviser, takes its toll on migrants and refugees.