Austerity buried? And the NHS too?

Britain has a new budget.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, for whom the word ‘beleaguered’ might have been specifically invented, has announced the government’s plans for spending and tax over the next year. And though it does little enough, what it does do is more noteworthy than one might have expected.

Hammond with the traditional red box for the budget

He has admitted at last that the prospects for economic growth are a lot worse than the government had previously claimed. What’s more, debt is at twice the level the Tories inherited when they first came to office in 2010, and which at the time they described as intolerably high. 

Indeed, their primary goal was to reduce the debt level massively. To achieve it, they launched a painful programme of austerity, to get government spending in balance within one parliament (five years), later extended to two parliaments, and now to some time in the next decade. Meanwhile, debt climbed inexorably.

This track record ought to be enough to prove to any but the most ideologically blinkered that austerity isn’t working. But the dogmatism of the Tories has prevented them ever accepting as much previously. So it’s interesting to discover that in this budget they have at last made the admission, if only tacitly: the Chancellor has announced plans for actual spending, most notably on housing, as a way of addressing the parlous state of the economy.

Sadly, however, he is doing a lot too little, particularly after the damage of the last seven years. For example, faced with a warning from the Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England, that healthcare needs another £4bn a year as a minimum, he has come up with £2.8bn over the next two and a half years. That’s going to mean that the service must still make choices that will be tough to the point of grief: certain treatments will simply not be available or will be denied so long as to lead to suffering or even death among patients.

What makes this even more depressing is that Hammond has also earmarked a further £3bn for Brexit preparations. In other words, we have to stump up more money that is being denied to healthcare, to cover the costs of a step – leaving the European Union – which will itself cause us even worse and longer-lasting economic damage. Not just shooting ourselves in the foot, but paying for the privilege.

There’s a special irony in the fact that we’re having to come up with this money for Brexit at a time that the NHS needs it so badly. A major element of the Leave campaign was the notorious claim that Brexit would free up £350m a week for the NHS. £18bn a year which would certainly sort the underfunding of the service.

Curious that in reality Brexit is costing us money, while the NHS crisis deepens.