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Polly Toynbee paints a terrifying, but accurate, picture of the NHS (Labour can only save the NHS by biting the tax bullet, 9 September). But her conclusion is not correct. There is another, better way.
There is a hidden assumption in her argument, which all the three main parties seem to share, that carrying on with Osborne-type cuts to 2019-20 to clear the budget deficit is somehow necessary and inevitable. It isn’t. Continued spending cuts, particularly in the NHS, in the sixth year of austerity with unemployment still over 2 million, is plain crackers, given the feedback effects that contract both incomes and government tax revenues. It isn’t even cutting the deficit. Alistair Darling’s two stimulatory budgets in 2009-10 brought the deficit down sharply from £157bn in 2009 to £118bn in 2011 – a reduction of nearly £40bn in just two years. Osborne’s austerity budgets have slowed the reduction to a trickle, down to £108bn now – a reduction of £10bn in three years. So which is more effective – public investment or spending cuts? It’s a no-brainer.
It’s not as though Osborne’s “recovery” offers an alternative either. Hardly anything has recovered except financial services. Wage levels, business investment, productivity, private debt and the trade gap are all strongly negative. The need for public investment now to kickstart the economy, when private investment is still flat on its back, is overwhelming. A £30bn investment package that could be funded for £150m at current interest rates would generate a million jobs within two years, increase incomes and cut the deficit far faster than the current prolonged austerity. It could even be funded without any increase in public borrowing at all, either by mandating the publicly owned banks RBS and Lloyds to prioritise lending for British industry, or by electronic printing of money (QE) targeted directly on industrial investment, or by a super-tax on the 1% ultra-rich.
The whole economy would at last revive, not just the froth at the top, and the straitjacket of Osbornomics and endless cuts would be removed. The financial pressures on the NHS wouldn’t melt away, but they would be enormously eased.
Michael Meacher MP
Labour, Oldham West and Royton
• Your 8 September edition highlighted the dangers to the NHS caused by the government’s top-down reorganisation (Cancer services weakened by NHS revamp, says report) and the secret negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which locks in privatisation (Unions say planned trade deal poses threat to NHS). What a pity, then, that while you were able to use your whole centrefold for images of the Great North Run, with multiple logos of the sponsor, Bupa, prominently displayed, you could find no space for photos, or indeed any coverage, of the banners carried by the Darlington Mums, who had completed their 300-mile march from Jarrow in defence of the NHS on the previous day, nor of the thousands who turned out to meet them in Trafalgar Square. Consequently, you did not report Andy Burnham’s pledges at the rally to restore the secretary of state’s responsibility for service provision, make the NHS the preferred provider, repeal the Health and Social Care Act, and exempt the NHS from TTIP. The fight for an NHS that puts people above profit continues, and your paper needs to be at the forefront of those not only reporting that fight but ensuring that politicians’ promises are widely publicised so that they can be held to account for delivering on them.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London
• As one of the dozen or so people who gave up three weeks of my life to march the 300 miles from Jarrow to Westminster on the People’s March for the NHS, I was underwhelmed by the national media’s grasp of the predicament of UK taxpayers and disappointed at the poor reporting of the main issue.
Even your own online report (NHS ‘People’s March’ campaigners arrive in London after 300-mile march, 6 September) failed to place things in context when referring to the fact that only 6% of the NHS budget is spent on private healthcare. As an experienced health commissioner I can explain the workings of the clinical commissioning groups. We will begin to see radical changes to where the NHS budget is spent only once CCGs have rewritten the documentation for invitations to tender. The first wave of contracts will be let next April; then I expect the volume to increase in subsequent years. Therefore Oliver Letwin is perfectly correct, if he indeed said that the NHS will no longer exist in five years.
Few people we met on our long march wanted to pay the additional funds that will be necessary to maintain a more expensive health system where shareholder dividends are prioritised over the needs of patients. The new system will mirror the one in the US, and our wellbeing will suffer significantly.
Fiona Dent
Holyport, Berkshire
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