In one of his memorable fusillades against the NHS, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan observed that the service was the biggest employer in the world after the Chinese Red Army and the Indian State Railway. He was wrong, but not by much.
As the graph below shows, the NHS employs 1.4m people, making it the seventh largest employer in the world. It’s one reason why Andrew Lansley would have been wise to tread far more carefully than he did.
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