Nhs

The government's cash boost for the NHS isn't going to solve its problems. That's the verdict of pretty much every independent spending scrutiniser, including the National Audit Office's Comptroller, Amyas Morse. He's said today that the £20bn founding increase announced by Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt will maintain current standards, but won't enable the health service to grow as the population needs it to. There is also no way that the cash set out recently will solve one of the biggest drains on the health service: the crisis in social care. The Treasury only agreed money for the NHS, not the services that many patients need to be able to go home, and ministers are clear that spending on social care now needs to be discussed separately.

Simon Stevens: the NHS is making ‘significant preparations’ for no deal Brexit This morning Andrew Marr sat down for an interview with the Chief Executive of NHS England. With the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the NHS approaching this week, Marr asked Simon Stevens about the implications of a no deal Brexit on the health service, and whether he was making appropriate preparations for such an event: https://twitter.com/MarrShow/status/1013347688086061056 AM: ...When you were talking to MPs last autumn, you said that you hadn't been asked by government to plan for no deal. Has that changed? SS: There is now significant planning going on around all the scenarios, including medicine supply scenarios... AM: Really?

After the prime minister’s announcement that the NHS would be given a large boost in funding only partly paid for by taxes, some backbenchers called for fiscal responsibility. For them it is paramount that a government should live within its means and avoid increasing the budget deficit. And yet they have nothing to say about monetary policy. Quantitative Easing (QE), the creation of money out of thin air by the Bank of England, with the intention of boosting demand has been carried out in a manner highly beneficial to owners of existing assets. The Bank’s website explains how it works.

Today’s newspapers have managed to catch up with our cover story from last month: Theresa May has agreed to a massive cash splurge on the NHS. Rather than wait until the spending review to announce this, there will be a political stunt presenting the cash as a 70th birthday gift to the health service. But it is instructive nonetheless: it underlines how this is not a serious assessment of the health service’s needs but a politically motivated gesture. Once it would have been opposed by the fiscal hawks in the Tory party but now these people tend to be keener the Brexit bus pledge of £350m a week for the NHS being honoured – which, by the time of the next election, it will be. The biggest question is how to fund this.

Love it or hate it, you’re likely well aware that season four of Love Island launched on Monday night. The media frenzy is impossible to escape. Traditional and social media are a-buzz about the contestants, the couplings, and the budding drama that is bound to escalate in coming weeks. But the first episode had its critics – and I’m not just referring those who think the sexual escapades of Brits on holiday shouldn’t be at the top of the news agenda. One of the contestants received particularly intense backlash from the public – presumably not for the same reasons the ladies didn’t step forward to choose him, but because of his job. Or rather, a job he’s put on hold.

In this week’s issue, the Spectator reveals that the government is planning a significant yearly increase in the NHS’s budget. But, Lara Prendergast asks in the podcast, isn’t this the £350 million a week bus pledge? And how will the government pay for this (00:40)? We also talk about the difficulties in modern adoption with Prue Leith (15:30), and finally, we talk to Martin Tyler and Mark Palmer on whether this year’s World Cup, held in Russia, is set to be the most political ever (26:35). One of the most infamous images of the EU referendum campaign was that bus. The one which promised £350 million to the NHS each week if we were to leave. Many thought it fantasy, but is that promise now coming true?

Nigel Lawson once wrote that 'the National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion'. It's a justly celebrated line because it rings so true – though the second half of the sentence, even more uncomfortably true, is invariably left out: '... with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood'. This summer, adherents of our national quasi-religion are marking the 70th anniversary of its foundation by St Aneurin Bevan. The ceremonies – less preposterous but just as intense as Danny Boyle's tribute to the NHS in Britain's Olympic opening ceremony – have the unqualified blessing of our actual religions.

James Delingpole is right, of course, to extol the virtues of capitalism (‘We don’t deserve capitalism’, 5 May) but wrong to imagine that if only we stuck to strict capitalist principles we could cure problems like the allegedly system-clogging bureaucracy in the NHS. The United States probably has the most ‘capitalistic’ health service in the world; but it has seen an even greater rise in numbers of bureaucrats than the NHS, contributing to its ranking as the world’s most expensive healthcare system. Or take US universities: they too operate on a very capitalistic model which has seen student fees rise steeply over the past three decades and has burdened the campuses with huge bureaucracies.