I have two personal stories to tell, one short, one long. In 2015, my aunt, who was in her 70s, was meant to have an operation on her jaw. This was to correct an earlier operation that had been botched so badly that she could barely open her mouth. It was repeatedly postponed but finally the day came: she was on a bed, about to go into theatre when she was informed that there had been a mistake and it had been postponed again. She went home in bewildered tears.

Eventually she did have her operation, which involved a tracheotomy. After a long convalescence, she was discharged from Guy’s Hospital in London. A few days later, my aunt heard a pop and noticed that her tracheotomy had started weeping blood. The visiting nurse looked it over and said it was fine. That night, she bled to death while a friend watched helplessly.

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My wife’s story is longer and more involved, but in its way equally damning. In 2016, she developed intense chest pains. She began to lose weight rapidly, couldn’t climb the stairs in our flat and was coughing up blood. She visited the GP three times but each time was told there was nothing serious wrong; the blood was from a raw throat from repeated coughing. The symptoms did not go away, so she went to A&E at Lewisham hospital.

Here, after a scan, she was diagnosed with pulmonary embolisms: blood clots in her lungs, a potentially fatal condition. She was put on blood thinners to break the clots down and prevent more from forming. Since then she’s had constant problems with her lungs, including pneumonia, but despite being passed from haematologists to pulmonary specialists to neurologists to more respiratory consultants, nobody knows or seems to care what caused the clots.

When Covid came round she was deemed high risk and we have been doing our best to isolate — which is not easy, as she became pregnant in November. She was referred to a high-risk obstetrician, who told her that the William Harvey hospital in Ashford would be informed of her condition.

We had a healthy baby girl at the end of July. I won’t go into too many details about the birth, only to say that it was traumatic and not handled well by the midwives. One of them, rather than waiting for the placenta to come out naturally, was tugging at it, despite my wife in agony pleading with her to stop, until it tore. Our daughter was whisked off to the resuscitaire twice because she was having trouble maintaining her body temperature. In fact, the room she was born in was freezing because the window was broken. Later she developed an infection from a botched cutting of the umbilical cord.

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Because of the danger of blood clots and the pain she was in, my wife needed a doctor to see her, but 10 hours after giving birth, neither my wife nor our daughter had been examined. By this time, she needed her blood thinners, but despite asking for them repeatedly, they never came. She was meant to stay in hospital overnight but we didn’t feel comfortable being repeatedly ignored in the stifling hot ward during a pandemic, so went home.

We came back the next day. Our daughter was checked over by a pediatrician. But still nobody would attend to my wife, who could barely walk and was terrified of blood clots. A midwife asked her lots of questions, mainly about breastfeeding. My wife’s concerns about her insides were dismissed as “anxiety.” We went home again.

The pelvic and abdominal pain had increased the next day, my wife couldn’t walk and was worried she might have an infection from the torn placenta. She contacted her midwife who told her to call 111. My wife spoke to a doctor who said, no, she should speak to the midwife. Eventually she was referred back to William Harvey hospital’s Ambulatory Care, but nobody there knew what to do with her. They ran blood tests for infection which came back negative but also indicated high D-dimer levels, suggesting potential blood clots. They scheduled an ultrasound for DVT for five days later then sent her to Maternity Daycare because of her pelvic and abdominal pain. The team here also didn’t understand why she had been sent to them. Eventually a young Greek doctor took pity on her and conducted an examination. He then took a swab, a urine sample, and consulted some surgeons on her behalf.

The following Monday, when my wife called the hospital for the results of a swab and urine sample, she was told they had no record of her. The women on the phone didn’t understand why someone in my wife’s position would have been sent to Maternity Daycare and more or less implied that she was delusional. More than a week after giving birth, she had a scan and, thankfully, did not have blood clots.

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It’s not as shocking as my aunt’s story but my wife was in pain, needed help and had a potentially life-threatening condition — yet she was passed around with nobody taking responsibility. She spoke with dozens of people who all gave her differing advice. There was no communication between the consultants who knew my wife’s case and the hospital staff. With every person she dealt with, she had to start from the beginning.

Anyone who has any experience with the NHS would see this as fairly routine, bad but not shocking. My wife’s American family finds the whole thing baffling: why can’t you make an appointment with the specialist you saw before? They don’t understand that once you have been discharged from one department, then it’s go back to Old Kent Road. You must start again with your GP, a call to 111 or a visit to A&E. Our Polish friends think the whole thing is a joke and go home for any medical treatment.

But at least it’s egalitarian, right? Not like that awful American system. Well, it is and it isn’t. Money won’t get you very far but getting to see the right person takes an enormous amount of time, persistence and ideally a sharp analytical mind and a good grasp of the English language. My wife keeps detailed notes of everybody she speaks to. Our recent experience took the best part of a week, and I’m lucky to be in full time employment, meaning I get two week’s paternity leave. I can’t imagine that an Uber driver or small business owner would find the time.

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Several doctors have suggested my wife file a complaint, but if we didn’t complain about the death of my aunt, which we should have done, then we probably won’t about this. The ultimate arbiter, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) has a woeful record: it had 103,965 enquiries in 2019-2020, of which it investigated a mere 1,493 complaints. The maternity ward at William Harvey has been a scandal for a number of years now for its “outcomes” — i.e. babies dying. It’s an almost heretical thing to say but I’m now at the stage where I simply don’t trust the NHS.

From talking to friends, family and neighbours, our experiences are not unusual, so why do so many British people regard the National Health Sservice as something close to a religion? Well, it’s there at the most critical moments in our lives: births, illnesses and death. With the BBC going the way of the Church of England in relevancy, the NHS is one of the last things that binds us together. If we admit to ourselves that it isn’t very good, then what else would there be?

But also, NHS worship does have a grain of truth in it: many doctors and nurses are heroic, delivering great care under difficult circumstances. When I was treated successfully for testicular cancer by the team at St Bart’s in London, it was like getting the keys for the executive washroom. Blood tests came back in half an hour rather than a week. The cancer nurse gave me her mobile number and said I could call any time if I had any concerns. The chemotherapy was awful, but knowing that I was in good hands was reassuring. That was 15 years ago but they still check up on me every year.

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Why can’t it always be like this? Of course, more money would help, but anyone who has had regular dealings with the NHS knows the organisation has severe bureaucratic problems. There are lots of people working in the healthcare system who seem to consider the patients the problem, and all the money in the world isn’t going to change the culture in some departments. The inefficiencies are hugely expensive: think of all the highly-paid professionals my wife spoke to and how much it cost the NHS (that’s you and me).

Who would even attempt serious reforms when previous attempts at reorganisation such as the Conservative’s market reforms in the 80s or Labour’s PFI by all accounts made things worse? There are no votes in it and so, after years of being accused of trying to privatise the health service, the Tories have seized their moment with the pandemic and wrapped themselves in the NHS flag, all the better to hang on to newly-acquired working-class seats. If I hear Boris saying “our NHS” one more time, I will throw a brick through the television.

Bizarrely, during the early days of Covid-19, the message was to protect the NHS, not the people which it is meant to serve. This led to patients who had not been tested being discharged from hospital into old people’s homes, and so spreading the virus among the most vulnerable. It also led to cancelled operations and cancer treatments, and people afraid to come forward with ailments, some of which might be serious, for fear of overloading the system. Sentimentality towards the NHS costs lives.

At some point, with our ageing population and the increasing costs of healthcare, we will have to have a grown-up debate about how this is to be paid for. Once we accept that the NHS is not a deity, we stop clapping and painting murals or sharing stories about Donald Trump trying to buy it — when we’re honest about its failing as well as celebrating its successes — then maybe one day we’ll have a health service that befits one of the world’s wealthiest countries. I fear it won’t be for some time.

One encouraging thing, however, is the growth in low-cost private practices, mainly catering to East Europeans who don’t have time to deal with the NHS. Maybe this is the way to improve things: the gradual development of a parallel system for routine ailments with the full NHS for more serious stuff — perhaps, and this is a shocking thought, with some kind of insurance that covers both private and public care. If there’s any hope it lies with the Poles.

Some sensible folks were prepared: the Yale Club laid on enough booze for its members to last 14 years. For normal people who wanted a drink, however, it meant liquor that made you go blind, mobsters and non-stop Charleston competitions. Pretty much everyone agrees that “the Great Experiment” was a total failure. Yet if you actually look at what its architects wanted, it’s not so clear-cut — because Prohibition wasn’t really about banning alcohol, it was a feminist crusade.

The roots of the temperance movement in both Britain and America lie in the campaign against slavery. Once this had been achieved, rather earlier in Britain (1807 & 1833) than America (1865), all that energy needed a new outlet, someone else needed saving. The new goal was to emancipate the working classes from the tyranny of the saloon bar where the men would spend all their wages before coming home and beating the wife and children. Spirits were cheap and Americans drank an astonishing amount. In his book The Alcoholic Republic WJ Rorabaugh estimates that the average American in the early 19th century drank a pint of spirits per day!

Mostly female-led and female-dominated organisations like the American Temperance Society, Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League fought the good fight, and fought it well. Women didn’t have the vote, but they could exercise their political muscles in other ways. Many of the techniques of the anti-slavery movement were used: religiously-infused public meetings, mass petitions, articles placed in the press and striking prints depicting the misery of alcohol. In Britain there was The Bottle by the caricaturist George Cruikshank showing the alcoholic decline of a family over eight prints. In America lurid novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There by Timothy Shay Arthur made the same argument.

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Some temperance campaigners were more forceful, among them Carrie A. Nation who used to smash up bars with a hatchet. “Hatchetation” she called it. She was born Carrie Amelia Moore but got her stirring name from marrying a Methodist preacher named David Nation. As you can imagine her antics made her very unpopular with America’s saloon keepers; on a visit to Britain, she was almost lynched by a crowd of 3,000 Glaswegians.

These organisations were not campaigning to ban alcohol per se. In his stimulating book, A Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth writes: “They weren’t really against alcohol. They were against a pattern of behaviour associated with men in saloons. They absolutely did not care if a New York novelist had a glass of claret with her Sunday lunch.”

You will be familiar with this argument from people who are intensely relaxed about minimum alcohol pricing because it won’t affect their Sauvignon Blanc habit or junk food bans while quite happy to eat lardo on sourdough. People went along with the dry movement because they thought that it was aimed at drinkers of hard liquor in saloons, and, it has to be said, the Irish. Yes, like “Whacking Day” in The Simpsons, there was a large anti-Irish element to the Prohibition movement.

Prohibitionists were largely Protestants who didn’t like the influx of whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics and wine-drinking Italians. There was even a whole school of theology like Reverend William Patton’s 1871 work Bible Wines “proving” that Jesus didn’t actually drink wine. It was also town versus country, and there are parallels with Trump here, with your God-fearing rural folk being in favour of Prohibition against city dwellers, often Catholic or Jewish, religions with no traditions of abstinence.

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America was divided into wets and drys, allegiances that cut across party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats had strong dry factions, and as drys tended to vote on the single issue, unlike wets, it was politically expedient to pander to them. Temperance was becoming a powerful political force, and before the First World War, 13 states had already gone dry with 31 others having dry counties. There are still dry counties today, including the one where Jack Daniel’s is made.

In America, the people who held things in balance were the Germans, who dominated brewing and provided most of the political capital against the temperance movement. But after the United States entered the First World War they lost their influence, since who would want to be associated with those nasty war-mongering Germans? With the Germans out of action, Prohibition became a shoo-in. But when it was finally passed in 1919, all those Americans who thought it wouldn’t apply to them were in for a rude shock. The Volstead Act, which was largely dictated by the Anti Saloon League, applied to anything over 0.5% ABV.

Prohibition lasted until 1933, and, it was a success in terms of the original aims of the temperance movement. The male-dominated saloon was no more. The new bars that emerged allowed women. This is one of the ironies of Prohibition, which curbed, to some extent, male drinking, but made it more socially acceptable for women to visit bars as they had been welcome in speakeasies. Drinking became an equal opportunities past-time. What could be more feminist than that? Yet many Americans stayed dry, and by 1939, 42% of the country still didn’t drink.

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It had some positive unexpected side effects. Many Americans discovered a love for Italian food when they realised that immigrant restaurants had access to wine either smuggled in or home-made from Californian grapes. White people mixed with black people in cities like New York where they picked up a love of jazz music. A newspaper columnist wrote: “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.”

The Catholic Church became unusually popular as it was exempt from Prohibition for altar wine. Meanwhile, the rest of the world benefitted as bartenders went to London and Paris, spreading cocktails and jazz music. Hotels all over the world opened American bars to cater to tourists escaping Prohibition. It was boom time for Scotch whisky, since Scottish producers had no qualms, unlike their Irish cousins, of shipping vast quantities of booze to the Bahamas or Canada to be smuggled into the US.

Of course, it wasn’t all cocktails and Duke Ellington. American society at all levels was corrupted by making such a staple illegal and putting it in the hands of organised crime. Prohibition was the making of the American Mafia. And surely the curbing of America’s hard liquor habit could have been achieved with more moderate legislation?

It was also a disaster for the American drinks industry, one which it has not fully recovered from. Hundreds of regional brewers closed to be replaced after repeal by a few giants, Californian wine only took off again in the 1970s, and the American whiskey business, once the biggest in the world, was destroyed. Selling alcohol is still incredibly bureaucratic. Only now with the emergence craft beer and the rediscovery of classics like rye whiskey, is the industry returning to its pre-First World War vibrancy. One hundred years after the Volstead Act was instituted, Americans are still feeling the effects of Prohibition.