fahrenheit451:354

Herewith gleaned from UKPublicSpending.co.uk   The facts such as they are - empirical data.

Government Spending: the Details

About 79 percent of public spending comes from the central government; About 21 percent is spent by local authorities.

The central government is budgeted to spend £667.7 billion in FY 2020. Pension programs, including the state pension and civil service pensions, will cost about £161.1 billion; health care and the NHS will cost £143 billion; defence, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, will cost about £50.3 billion. Welfare, or Social Security, costs for the central government will come in at £71.4 billion, and central government education expenditures are budgeted at £44.6 billion. Interest on the national debt is estimated at £51.7 billion.

We estimate local authorities will spend about £179.9 billion in FY 2020. The biggest expenditure is £54.8 billion for welfare. Then comes £47.2 billion for local authority education, and £15.4 billion for protection: police and fire. Local authorities will spend £9.5 billion on transport, and about £50 billion on all other programs.

As the #GE2019 winds its weary way through November , the major parties are assembling,as they are wont to do ,their various versions of what amount of public spending ought or does or might or might not be accorded to the National Health Service.

And, of course ,the Labour Party ( all wings ) their Trades Union satrapies and all the  non-parliamentary "Left" are pitching their narrative,as usual in that it is only they and they alone who "care" are "compassionate" and exemplary humanitarians who look after the sick,the dying etc.

And short of a violent,bloody Bolshevik revolution ; no.there never ever will be sufficient monies to finance their Disney-fantasy version of a health service or anything else for that matter.

And of course they're the ones who make it part of their catechism never to raise the query as to where all this overwhelming additional demand and pressure on the NHS arises from in the first place.

Or on our education system or GP waiting lists or on the inadequate housing stock or the relative downward pressure on wages and worsening shortage of full time jobs.

They don't know about all of those either.

fahrenheit451:226

Winter is here.

And so the annual plethora of otiose ideological partisan cant and vacuous platitudes aka  the " NHS is in Crisis " discourse is once again under way.

The answer to " will the NHS ever be out of a state of crisis?" appears after many decades to be; no.

The only differences to be discerned amongst all the world's national health systems is the degree to which they are all in one way or another perceived to be " performing " or  functioning at a noticeably lower standard than any other arbitrarily chosen health system or systems to which they are compared at any point in time.

For example ,the reputable body on such matters , The King's Fund posted online on June 8 2017,  ( herewith an extract gleaned )  from " How Does the NHS Compare Internationally ".

" Although the UK has been at the forefront of the development of measures of health care quality (like the national patient survey programme) and the use of quality improvement techniques (like evidence-based clinical guidelines), performance on some indicators of health care quality remains ‘average or disappointing’ compared to international benchmarks according to the OECD. For example, although there is a comprehensive screening programme for breast and cervical cancer, survival rates are below the EU average (despite improvements in recent years). Rates of hospital admissions for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (combined) have improved at a faster rate than many other countries in recent years, but also remain well above the EU average. The UK has also slipped down international league tables for infant mortality and is now 15th out of 19 comparable countries. In a recent study that compared access to and quality of health care in 195 countries by analysing ‘health care-amenable mortality’ – ie, mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal if effective health care is in place – the UK is ranked 30th out of 195 countries – its overall score was similar to Portugal and Malta but lower than comparable countries like Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. "

It is invariably the ready ammunition of  facts 'n' figures that the contending ideological parties in the annual grand remonstrance on the NHS resort to in order to bolster their respective cases.

The Winter 2017 / 18 clash of opinionated otiose cant differs somewhat markedly from previous annual tourneys in so far as the Spend -a -heck -load -More faction is noticeably a virtual appendage of the Remoaner anti - brexit lobby.

They have unashamedly incorporated their metropolitan elitist  anti- brexit prejudices,stuff and nonsense about EU citizens,unrestricted EU labour market competition,etc. into their narrative of a NHS about to collapse because of a shortage of staff.

Which of course can be empirically refuted.An objective process that Remoaners find to be anathema.

fahrenheit451:211

There's a NHS Providers conference being held today, 8 November and it's all about the putative underfunding of the National Health Service.Well,there's something new!

The NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens set his stall out pretty early ensuring that his tawdry,bombastic posturing was top of the agenda.And not necessarily the Conference's agenda but rather every news agenda.

"Trust in democratic politics will not be strengthened if anyone now tries to argue you voted Brexit, partly for a better funded health service, but precisely because of Brexit you now can't have one." - Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England

The entire exercise in gargantuan,egotistical  virtue signalling by Stevens merits the epithet Straw man :-

straw man

noun

 

1. 1.

   an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.

    
2. 2.

   a person regarded as having no substance or integrity.

    

   And that's about it.

    

   Sufficient unto the day the blathering bow scraping humbug nonsense of the seditionist metropolitan elitist EU shill thereof.