● In 1980, an article in The Times predicted that over the next five years, the National Health Service (NHS) would be privatised step by step, and the UK would drift towards an American-type healthcare system.

This obviously did not happen. But that has not stopped people from repeatedly making the same prediction ever since. Conspiracy theories about ‘secret plans’ to dismantle and privatise the NHS are a fixed feature of British politics.

● After more than four decades of moral panic about secret privatisation plans, the UK still has an unusually state-centred healthcare system.

Even if we include general practitioners, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists, spending on non-NHS providers still only accounts for about a quarter of the NHS budget. Spending on private providers (i.e., companies such as Bupa) in the way most people probably understand it accounts for less than one-tenth of the budget, a figure that does not show a rising trend. Private hospitals only account for one in ten hospital beds in the UK, compared to three out of ten in Austria, four out of ten in France, six out of ten in Germany, seven out of ten in Belgium and ten out of ten in the Netherlands.

● The most remarkable feature of NHS-related conspiracy theories is that they are not restricted to eccentric fringe groups but are very much part of mainstream debate. The main outlets publishing these stories are not obscure blogs, but mainstream newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian and The Independent. Its main purveyors are not eccentric fringe figures, but mainstream journalists, academics, senior members of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), large trade unions such as Unite, and Members of Parliament, including shadow cabinet members.