When I returned to live in the UK in 1984 after some years in Greece, people warned me not to get ill. Margaret Thatcher’s public spending cuts had shredded the National Health Service. I looked into it. Government spending on the NHS appeared to have gone up. When I told people this, they said I was wrong. The official statistics were lies. Everyone who worked in the NHS could tell you that services had been cut to the bone.

A historical review by the King’s Fund think-tank shows that there was indeed a real-terms increase in public spending on the NHS in England in 1984-85 and in the few years before that. The government statistics were right.

This did not mean that health services weren’t suffering. But that may have been for reasons other than cost-cutting: an ageing population was imposing an increasing strain on the system, or advances in medical science meant a rise in costs higher than general inflation, or people’s expectations had risen beyond what the NHS could provide. These are issues that still dog the UK’s health service and it might have been better to have spoken openly about them then.