Rachel Reeves’ Left-wing Budget was supposed to set the economy on a stable course, but to the surprise of practically no one, she has done nothing of the sort.
Her mantra of ‘invest, invest, invest’ translates in reality fo ‘borrow, borrow, borrow’. Much of her headlong rush to spend and borrow to increase the size of the state is aimed at pouring money into the gaping maw of an unreformed NHS.
As anyone who has had the misfortune to have need of medical treatment recently will know, it is deeply flawed despite the best efforts of many gallant staff.
More money on its own will not fix the problems – it will merely impoverish taxpayers further and the NHS will still be a mess. There is to be a £22.6billion increase in the day-to-day health budget, and a £3.1billion increase in the capital budget over this year and next.
These very large sums of money are not tied to any performance targets. The blame, naturally, is pinned on the supposedly evil Tories and what Reeves labels their ‘austere’ approach to the NHS.
Deeply flawed: Much of the Chancellor’s headlong rush to spend and borrow to increase the size of the state is aimed at pouring money into the gaping maw of an unreformed NHS
The health service is, of course, still recovering from the strains placed upon it by the pandemic, a global pestilence that cannot plausibly be laid at the door of the Conservative Party.
The Government is to publish a ten-year plan for the NHS in the spring, which is going to set out a blueprint for a shift ‘from hospitals to the community’, a push into digital and a big drive to preventative health measures. All of these are sensible directions of travel, but extremely difficult to execute.
And the biggest problem in the NHS is not lack of money, it is the weird way in which a wasteful and dysfunctional institution has become an object of national worship.
Any criticism is viewed as heresy. The ‘free at the point of need’ approach should not involve behaving towards patients as if we are powerless paupers. Yet we are supposed to be grateful for any attention we receive, however inadequate.
Demands on the NHS will only mushroom further due to the ageing population and the post-Covid surge in long-term sickness.
There are 2.8m working-age people claiming they cannot do a job due to chronic ill-health – a phenomenon peculiar to these islands: other nations have seen a drop in numbers as Covid receded.
The Budget contained a £240m package aimed at ‘helping’ the sick and disabled into the labour market and a ‘Get Britain Working’ White Paper is in the pipeline.But behind the fine words, the reality is that, for Labour, the NHS is not just about patients.
The Government is equally, if not more, preoccupied with the interests of the 1.7m workforce, many of whom are unionised.
NHS staff should be well-paid and pensioned, but the profit-making part of the economy is being taxed to smithereens and employees in the private sector are treated with contempt.
Anyone who has saved so they can pay for private care in a medical emergency is so despised by Labour that they are now labelled as a non-worker.
Labour seems to think the UK should consist of a health service with a nation tacked on.
Individuals and firms should not be shamelessly bled dry for tax revenues, only to find that when they need the NHS, they are let down.
The point of the NHS is that it is here to serve us – all of us – not the other way around.
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