this picture is the entire history of the NHS. an organisation for "the nation", staffed disproportionately by migrants/ppl of colour who have never fully counted as British or human, and who have often had little to no access to the welfare settlement of the postwar "Golden Age"

The Golden Age was also the age of colour bars in white unions, workplaces, housing lists. The age of "P*ki-bashing" & "N*gger-hunting." The age when the UK state under Labour & Tory govs systematised its white nationalist border regime that continues to be the framework today

it was the age when Enoch Powell arranged for Black & Asian migrants to staff the NHS in the 50s when health secretary & then led calls for wholesale repatriation along racial lines from the 60s on. deciding that Blackness could not be British, that it degraded the "British race"

Two days after the Empire Windrush arrived in Britain in 1948, 11 Labour MPs called for the Attlee gov to halt Black immigration. The call was based on shared arguments white worker orgs & white bosses had already been using for generations. Wages, conditions, "social cohesion".

The call for recognition of migrant/PoC sacrifice, now & in general, is necessary but inadequate. It challenges neither nation nor "race" & the violence they impose. It treats the racial division of labour & proximity to death as a natural artefact for national mourning & fawning

this picture is part of a much longer history of "race", empire and capital. Welfare, warfare, and work. That are inextricable from every aspect of how this crisis is playing out, and every other crisis that we've been living through.

As @RobbieShilliam puts it:

"Britain's division of labour has never been national in constitution or scope."

"There is no golden age of 'public goods' to return to that was not already racialised."