If we get another Conservative government, the Tories will be changing their mantra from the coded “The NHS is not sustainable” to a rather more blatant “WE do not want to use their NHS”.
Let the proles eat cake (from the food bank) – or play bingo with cheap pints?
ht Alex Andreou
The vast majority of interactions between individual citizens and the NHS are free at the point of use, including GP visits, Accident and Emergency admissions, and practically all the programmes of treatment which can follow on from them.
And there’s no doubt the rich are getting richer. Despite the tough economic conditions, the super-rich are getting richer, with the number of millionaires in the UK almost doubling in just two years uptil 2013.
Figures from HM Revenue & Customs showed there were 18,000 people earning £1m or more in the last tax year preceding the middle of 2013. Just two years previously, there had been only 10,000 in this income bracket. This is a significant increase on the 4,000 income millionaires recorded by the Revenue in the year 2000. The HMRC figures also show that more people are earning six-figure salaries. An additional 5,000 people now earn between £500,000 and £1m compared with two years ago; while a further 31,000 earned between £200,000 and £500,000 and 7,000 earned between £150,000 and £200,000. These figures cumulatively suggest that there is a growing disparity between the top earners – many of whom work in the financial sector – and the rest of society.
Mandelson may be ‘intensely relaxed’ about it all – but is he intensely relaxed about who pays for the NHS?
Whenever you hear news about wanting to bring in charges for the NHS, attention is never paid to the very rich who could afford to pay. Politicians of a certain ilk, enabled by a supine media, perpetuate the meme ‘the NHS is not sustainable’ demonstrating unsurpassable stupidity. It is not that the NHS is unsustainable – it’s just that some people feel they ought not to be contribuing to it out of general taxation. And the rest of the sheep follow.
The Cameron-led government may have wished to convey an ethos of ‘libertarian paternalism’, where we are nudged into decisions in the market. But it is now generally conceded that there are many decisions which are profoundly unsuitable for ‘Nudge’. Like a stubborn stain which refuses to go on a repeat wash and spin cycle, the Conservatives still want to be patricians. The problem is they’re failing at that.
Books have been written on the famous Harold Macmillan phrase, “You’ve never had it so good.” A number of reasons converge into Macmillan’s economic failure, but the phrase itself reinforces a sense of ‘them against us’. In spite of the talk about a social revolution in capitalism has not changed. It is still a system of minority wealth and mass poverty and insecurity. The only real dispute may be quite how large the “squeezed middle” is. Profits, stock exchange prices and the emergence of new crops of millionaires may truly mark the phase of “you never had it so good”. The Conservatives and high income Liberals don’t mind rubbishing the NHS as they hope not to use it. Whenever Grant Shapps talks about ‘hardworking people’, curiously he always talks about “them”.
The real charge sheet against David Cameron isn’t Eton or Bullingdon, arguably, but Carlton TV: how supposedly a good education is squandered for ‘ready money’. Where someone of his background might once have spent his early manhood serving with the Coldstream Guards, perhaps, he earnt his money doing PR for a television company. The legacy of the Conservative Party under the Thatcher revolution has been ‘easy money’ rather than wishing to build up an infrastructure we can all be proud of: what Miliband latterly called “the fast buck society”.
Douglas Carswell MP in the Telegraph had something quite interesting to say about it in the Telegraph in July 2013:
“Decades of patrician Toryism run out of SW1 have failed. What we need instead is insurgent Conservatism; anti big corporate interests and politics-as-usual in Westminster. Fiercely in favour of ordinary folk trying to make the most out of life.”
The Conservatives would hate to admit it but the cost-of-living crisis does resonate with voters. Also years of rubbishing the NHS has left a general public resenting the Conservatives, enabled by the Liberal Democrats, clinging onto government. In a patrician way, they legislated for a £2.4 bn implementation of the Health and Social Act (2012) which leading experts told them was fundamentally faulty because of the effect that competition would have.
It’s this arrogance and aloofness which is likely why this government will ultimately fall apart. The NHS reforms have not improved patient safety, but basically outsourced the NHS at turbo speed. Public resources have been allocated to the private sector. If it seems as if certain people don’t want to become ill in the NHS, that’s because they don’t – they want to tell you the NHS is “unsustainable” instead.
