More money for military spending but not for health and care
The spring statement is an occasion for unveiling plans for the UK economy. Investment in the NHS and addressing the social determinants of health across government departments are critical if the economy is not to fail. According to Treasury sources, on this occasion there were to be no policy rabbits pulled out of the hat to astonish and delight the electorate, and this has indeed proved to be the case. However, a last minute solution to the so far intractable issue of poor NHS performance would have been massively welcomed by the vast majority of people.
Indeed, this is an issue which demands urgent attention, starting off with a major cash injection emulating the successful approach to boosting funding taken by New Labour. This resulted both in a marked improvement in services and a huge rise in public satisfaction. Money is desperately needed to repair crumbling estate and address the ever rising maintenance deficit, now standing at £16bn; to build the promised new hospitals and bring down the waiting list from 7.3 million; to recruit staff to the 110,000 vacant post and improve retention; to invest in community and social care so that 1 in 7 hospital patients are no longer unable to be discharged; to end the annual half a million trolley waits of more than 12 hours for admission, resulting in 16,600 unnecessary deaths; to end the horrific, dangerous and undignified spectacle of corridor care, once unthinkable but now normalised; to increase the number of GPs (as promised); to implement the recommendations of multiple inquiries into the state of maternity services and end the appalling treatment of some women and babies; to get those on waiting lists with long term conditions back into productive employment and working again to boost the economy.
None of these things should have been passed over in a spring statement that supposedly looks to the future but was deliberately designed to be bland and unexciting. Such a contrivance may please those who regard the government as being shackled and hostage to the gilt markets, but for the millions crying out for Labour to honour its manifesto commitments to rebuild the NHS and roll back outsourcing, an indication was sorely needed that it is not just the rich 1% who matter, but the people as a whole. The Chancellor’s Freudian slip of ‘the promise that we changed’ rather than the ‘change we promised’ was telling. After the recent by-election saw Labour in only third place, a serious financial boost for health and social care could well have done something to reverse Labour’s electoral decline. It would certainly have been one way to improve people’s lives, however, this spring statement proved to be only a lost opportunity.
March 3rd, 2026
No words
In recent years, much of the world’s population has been (mis)governed by
mendacious psychopaths such as Donald Trump, Vladmir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu
—who is doing to the Palestinians and other Arabs states (e.g. Lebanon) exactly what
Hitler did to the Jews and their property in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the
1930s and 1940s, with leaders like Sir Keir Starmer supporting Netanyahu–and Boris
Johnson.
There are also “leaders” like Modi in India trying to stir religious hate amongst his
fellow Hindus against the minority Muslim population of India.
By contrast, the world has seen thoughtful and knowledgeable leaders, like Barack
Obama, but unfortunately he was ineffective when he was President of the USA
when nations crossed his ‘red lines’: most notably, when Vladmir Putin invaded and
annexed Odessa—thereby, Illegally invading a part of the Ukraine— President
Obama did nothing
When such crack-pots are on the loose–and even when they are not on the loose,
every country should ready for the future of emergence of crack-pots—a country
should always have adequate defences to keep it safe. Keeping a country safe is the
prime duty of every national Government. Unfortunately, expenditure on the UK’s
defences have been allowed to fall short of what has been required–and it is not just
the ‘top brass’ of the military who have mentioned this: experts at Chatham House
and in university departments who study matters related to national and regional
security have warned successive UK governments about the declining adequacy of
the UK’s defence.
Alas, the voters–the people who go to the polling-booths tend to be those like me
(I am in my 88th year) who belong to older generations and, in my opinion, are
largely a selfish lot: they are more interested in tax-breaks for themselves
and care little for younger generations: if they did care, the average expenditure
on a State-funded child’s education would NOT be £50 in real terms(viz. £50 after
taking account of inflation) in 2024 than it was in 2010. The older generation seem
have forgotten that the younger generations are “half our future”.
Moreover many—perhaps the vast majority?–of the older generations are under the
false impression that their State pension is funded out of their past National
Insurance contributions (NICs), but that is NOT the case: State pensions are paid
for out of the taxes of those of the younger generations who are in employment.
Combined expenditures on defence and pensions are equivalent to a substantial
percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—GDP, as its devisor (Prof. Simon Kuznets)
pointed out straight away, is very crude measure of national welfare.
I have not yet mentioned State expenditure on health. A large proportion of
such expenditure—whose magnitude is equal to a further substantial percentage of
GDP===is spent on the physical and mental health of older generations. Are the
richer members of the older generations prepared to pay more in taxes in order to
better fund our National Health Service and retain it as a public service?
As I have indicated above, the answer to the question just posed–based on some
samplng which, as a statistician and economist passé, is admittedly very crude–
is overwhelmingly negative.
Your plea to keep the NHS publc–a plea towards which I feel much empathy–is somewhat
naive, because it ignores completely a number of important issues that I have
raised in the earlier paragraphs of this response.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that I spent a total of nearly 6 years working
in Germany. There, they have commercialised health-insurance. Fortunately, I
myself had only make to a very few claims on my insurance. But a married couple
with whom I became friends, both became ill, and as the aggregate of their
claims had reached a certain limit, their heath=insurance company ceased to
help them anad, so the couple had to sell their house (on which there was a
mortgage still outstanding) and move into rented accommodation (which, at
the time, was fortunately subject to legislation on the control of rents.
The thing that struck me most of all whilst I was in Germany was that Ministers
at the Federal (i.e. national) level tended to have qualifications in, or very
practical experience closely related to, the work of the respective ministries
for which they had responsibility. What a contrast to the situation that we have had
in the UK! (For example, if my increasingly fallible memory serves me, that last
pukka economist whom the UK had as Chancellor of the Exchequer was Dr Hugh Dalton
in the first two years (1945-1947) of Clement Attlee’s government (1945-1951).)
We should be putting more money into the NHS instead of taking our country into a war we didn’t need to be part of.