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According to The Telegraph, a new proposal submitted to the UK’s airspace regulator could pave the way for a city-wide drone network connecting 12 hospitals across London.
The medical logistics firm Apian, which has already carried out 5,000 blood sample deliveries by drone, recently received approval to increase its daily hospital flights from 10 to 40. It is now seeking to establish additional “air highways” to link more NHS sites.
The expanded flight paths would stretch across much of the capital — from Wimbledon in the southwest to Chadwell Heath in the east — with drones expected to pass over landmarks including Kensington Palace, Hyde Park, and Oxford Circus as they transport urgent medical supplies. For fans of ‘Anglofututurism’, a term popularised by UnHerd’ own Aris Roussinos, this is a welcome vision of the future. But rather than a testament to Britain’s willingness to deliver high living standards by, as Aris wrote, harnessing ‘the optimism and high modernism of the post-war era, a vanished world of frenetic housebuilding and technological innovation where British scientific research could lead the world’, this is in fact shows how strong Britain’s vetocracy is.
Compare these drones to the ongoing saga of Heathrow’s new runway. It was backed by Tony Blair and several successor Prime Ministers yet it remains unbuilt, doing untold damage to Britain’s global connectivity and competitiveness. The British Chambers of Commerce estimates that the programme could deliver £30 billion in economic benefits to the UK over its lifetime, and that each year of delay costs the country between around £1bn. A desperately needed single strip of tarmac at an existing airport operating above 90% capacity has been stalled for decades due to environmental objections, local resistance and judicial review. But things could have been even worse; ahead of the last election Greg Hands, then MP for Chelsea and Fulham and Minister of State for Trade Policy, launched a constituency campaign to end night flights, which have happened since Heathrow opened.
The NHS drones won’t be received with such public hostility because they will be gaudily daubed with the moral authority of the National Health Service (which is becoming less like a national religion and more like a bizarre cargo cult). This, it seems, is the only way that economic or technological progress can circumvent the objections, protests, campaigns and paperwork that stymie what seems like every attempt to improve the material conditions of this country. As vital as the 100,000 Geonomes Project has been in advancing genomic medicine and understanding diseases, it is unthinkable that it would have been allowed to develop as a private venture.
But even then, the moral cover of delivering vital care might not be enough. Last year, plans for a cancer research hospital in Cambridge were challenged due to concerns over the potential for local water shortages. The Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff,
which now provides specialist cancer services to 1.5m people in south east Wales, was opposed vociferously due to local traffic congestion.
The NHS drones will be blessed by their infrequency and being limited to small sections of the airspace of the capital. But if even cancer hospitals struggle to escape the dead hand of Britain's planning paralysis, what hope is there to expand the drone delivery service to more than a few bucketfuls of blood? A vital service, perhaps, but hardly the return of Concorde Anglofuturists dream of.