Simon's Blog

95 Billion pounds is a lot of money – an astonishing amount of money only thing is it is not enough and not enough by an awful lot – maybe 8 billion maybe 30 billion – who really knows?   That last point is the real killer statistic – no one knows just how much money the NHS in England will need to keep functioning other than to say it is a huge amount of  money.

There are many stale arguments during the current election but perhaps the stalest is over the NHS.   It is one of Labour’s key subjects and so they are going full out to try and pretend that the NHS is about the be scrapped by the nasty Tories.  This is nonsense.   To hear some in the Labour party talk you would think that everything is wonderfully peachy in the NHS but for those nasty Tories.   Of course everything isn’t wonderful and never has been from the day the NHS was established in the 1940s.  It has always been strapped for cash. The Labour party  would like you to  think that nothing in the NHS is privatised when infact one of the key planks of the NHS, primary care, has always been privatised with most GP surgeries being run as private practices and somehow the walls have not come crumbling down.

Of course the Tories are no better.  They claim to be seeking 20 billion pounds of efficiency savings so that they can invest 8 billion (well at least I think that is what they are saying as with much about the NHS it is really just hot air).  The Tories have just made a pledge/vow/deceit not to raise taxes over the length of the next parliament – well how are they going to pay for the extra spending on the NHS if these efficiency savings don’t pan out – and they never do?   It is all nonsense.

Now it is reasonable to assume that any organisation that spends 95 Billion pounds a year can make efficiency savings without the the whole system collapsing. The problem with the NHS is that no one is really willing to accept them – especially the people who seem to think that closing a hospital which is no longer needed is a step too far.   It is not helped by the SNP position that everything in the Scottish NHS is rosy when clearly it is not.  So people in England look at Scots and wonder why the Scots can get free prescriptions when they can’t in England?  The truth is that, as with many things to do with the SNP, free prescriptions make no sense at all and they certainly don’t appear to have improved the Scottish health in any visible way.

Mention of the SNP brings the West Lothian question front and centre when talking about the NHS in England.   The new government is mostly likely going to be a Labour/Lib Dem coalition or arrangement.   However, this will make it very difficult to muster the votes in the House of Commons to get a majority without a deal/understanding of some description with the SNP.   SNP members of the Westminster parliament can vote on all matters to do with the English NHS yet the reverse isn’t the case as health is solely under the purview of the Scottish parliament.  So to do anything for NHS England the new government will need the SNP, who will no doubt try and get concessions for their assistance.  In short the most political battles of the next parliament will be fought over the NHS in England.

A few weeks ago I said the most important result to look out for was the number of Lib Dem MP’s to SNP MP’s.  Once the new government has been formed the most destructive political fight will be over the NHS because, as I believe I might have said before – we don’t have, despite all the outright porky pies told us by the desperate political classes, the money.