Three quarters of the UK population are pretty much unaffected by the cuts and the proportion is falling. There’s nowhere near enough support here to win a General Election, particularly in the marginal seats.
Labour needs to offer something far more inspirational that connects with the broad swathe of ordinary people.
I see nobody inside the NHS who thinks we can keep the show on the road without very substantial injections of money. The Spending Review produced just about enough to bail out all the bankrupt institutions. Perhaps to keep the NHS afloat until next Summer.
The only policy issue anyone wants to talk about is devolution. I’m in demand to speak about DevoManc across the country.
On the whole I think Devo is a good idea. Politicians in Manchester are talking about health inequality, prevention, public health, innovation integration of health and social services – and cutting 30% off hospital budgets. All those are good ideas – though you might not agree. But there is absolutely no evidence that these proposals will reduce demand for healthcare, and in particular hospital care, rapidly,
or possibly at all. DevoManc asked for a £600 million transformation fund in the spending review, but there has been no announcement that they’ve got it.
In Cuba when times were hard the government focussed on improving the health of the people, and as a result retained more popularity than might have been expected. Is that what we should be doing?