NHS and Treasury deadlocked over budget increase before spending review
We all know, don’t we, that the NHS needs around £22 billion. The Stevens plan requires £8 billion and Osborne only has £2 billion for it at the moment.
What does that teach us?
None of these people are our friends – that’s what.
George Osborne and the NHS boss Simon Stevens are at loggerheads because the chancellor has rejected pleas to increase the health service’s budget by £4bn next year, despite fears that patient care could suffer if the money is not forthcoming.
The row between the Treasury and NHS England before next week’s spending review has reached such a critical point that David Cameron may have to step in and make the final decision, NHS sources say.
The Guardian understands that Stevens, NHS England’s chief executive, has been rebuffed in his protracted efforts to persuade Osborne to hand the service the £4bn he believes is the minimum it needs to press ahead with transforming how it provides care.
The chancellor is understood to have offered Stevens only about £2bn, and is also understood to believe that any more than that is unrealistic and unaffordable in such a tight spending round and that the NHS needs to get its fast-crumbling finances in order to help balance its books.
Source: NHS and Treasury deadlocked over budget increase before spending review | Politics | The Guardian
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They are taught at Eton to make tough decisions, it goes with being of the ruling class. So let him tell us which groups of patients he’s going to let suffer more pain or for some to let die. All so that we can pay off a deficit that should not be paid off at this point in the economic cycle. Furthermore, we are not paying off the deficit because trying to pay off debt when interest rates are at 0.5 percent and the economy is to weak to take so much spending being taken out the economy.
We’ve had disabled people murdered on the alter of austerity, and its now defunct economic theory, and as the stupidity of this policy is set out for another 5 years this government is moving on to kill anybody who happens to be seriously ill while they want to pay off debt we do not need to pay off and, which in fact, we are not paying off.
This months lending requirement by Iron Osborne is £8.5 billion, the highest amount ever taken out.
shaunt
“They are taught at Eton to make tough decisions, it goes with being of the ruling class”?
I dispute your first claim on the basis that we see no evidence of this in their behaviour. If their decisions were tough, they would be unpopular with Tory supporters. How many Tory supporters have been upset by Tory decisions? None.
I dispute your second claim on the basis that there is no such think as a “ruling class” – only people who tell us they are “ruling class” and expect us to accept it.
Any decision about letting NHS patients die due to lack of funding will not be tough at all because most Tories go private.
Mike, thanks very much for your response, could not agree more with your first point – I meant tough decisions as in those made by General Haige in the First World War. That is tough for every body else but them, the tough for them relates to the fact they will have to learn to live with some people thinking they are greedy, ignorant bar stewards (IDS as achieved this to a mind boggling degree). Finally, on this point , is David Cameron still refusing to give membership numbers for the last 3 years? I suspect a lot of ‘one nation Tories’ have left the party. John Major is not alone in being unhappy with Cameron/Osborne’s new divide between rich and poor.
As to the ‘ruling class’, we’ve had this debate before. The’ve no right to rule anything other than their own life – one person one vote. In reality they are born into massive – for the great majority unbelievable wealth, and a contact list in their personal lives that reads like a who’s who of the nation’s most powerful people. To my mind the most important of which are England’s media barons; or the media barons wish to get a place in their ‘club’. Rupert Murdock fits into the latter of these. For these reasons, and lot more besides, they are almost a permanent ‘ruling class’. By almost I mean they have enough power/wealth to skew public opinion, enough politicians and so the democratic process in their favour. Power does not have to be absolute to rule effectively,
Jeremy Corbyn is a definite sign, and your own successes, that hubris has got the better of them. As is the rebellion by the professional class.
This is a bit more pessimistic than it should be, but I’m in a lot of pain and I’ve wrote enough as it is.
shaunt
P.S. ‘you’re playing a blinder’
How long can the government go without cutting corporate welfare or chasing corporate tax dodgers? There is plenty of money to be had, it’s all down to an uneven distribution of wealth. They can’t keep acting as tho this is an option they know nothing about.
Slightly off topic, but you can delete it if it is too far off.
There is a petition here to extend the consultation period on the NHS mandate.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/112976