The work on that task is now heavily underway. That is why ten years of real term cuts in funding per operation in the NHS are to be ended. It is not often that you hear a Conservative Prime Minister announce that she is going to put up taxes to fund £20 billion more revenue for the NHS. It is also why her party are trying to rebrand themselves as a government of home builders and why Gove is making such efforts to change the image of the party on environmental politics.
So expect to hear a lot more about the caring sharing Conservatives. And don’t rule out another snap election.
There are, however, one or two small problems with all this rebranding. The main one being that politics isn’t just about soundbites and marketing. It is about values and trust. That is exactly where May’s biggest problems lie. She doesn’t generate a lot of trust. How many new people is she going to be able to persuade to trust her with the future of health care, housing, education and the environment? And for good reason. Her track record is poor and her policies for the future are deeply flawed.
Let’s start with the NHS. The Brexit dividend for the NHS is that it will be forced to put out for competitive international contract a high proportion of its services. You cannot sign a new trade deal with the US or anyone else without agreeing to international arbitration of trade disputes. Any “non competitive” practices such as having only one nationalised supplier of health care is going to be challenged in those international courts. We can therefore expect a fragmented service with large chunks of the easy work sold off to a string of private suppliers and the hard and difficult complex and unprofitable services staying with the NHS. We only have to look at Carillion or at Labour’s horribly costly Private Finance Initiative new hospitals to see how much damage that could do. It is very welcome that the Conservatives appear to have finally understood how bad things have got in the NHS after ten years of austerity. It is much less welcome that they are telling us it must be accompanied by yet another phase of bureaucracy reduction. So far every time the Conservatives have promised us they are going to reduce NHS bureaucracy they have launched yet another top down re-organisation accompanied by ever more complex contracting out. That model has increased chaos to such an extent that for many staff it has proved even more damaging to morale than the actual funding cuts.
Then let’s consider education. The funding per pupil in real terms has gone down every year for ten years. Along with the value of the pay of virtually every person working in education who isn’t the Head of an Academy Trust getting awarded another lovely bonus for telling everyone else to work harder for less. At a time of rising school numbers the pressures continue to mount. This week local authorities across Yorkshire announced that none of them had enough money to provide the level of service for children with Special Educational Needs that they have previously provided. Every single local authority is faced with the prospect of either telling parents facing real challenges that they can’t help them properly or taking money away from mainstream education to subsidise their children’s need. Whilst ordinary schools are facing yet another round of horrible cuts grammar schools are being told that they can expand their numbers regardless of whether there are any extra pupils in their area and single faith schools are also being fostered. Those aren’t exactly ideal ways to rationally allocate scarce resources needed to respond to demographic change. Nor are they an ideal way to detoxify a soiled political brand.
When it comes to housing all the emphasis has been on dumping pesky planning regulations and allowing developers to build. The result has been a rapid increase in the number of new housing estates on nice green fields in country areas with properties costing half a million upwards. That is excellent news for the shareholders in the building companies that donate heavily to the Conservative Party and lobby them regularly for de-regulation. It is less good news for any young person who doesn’t happen to earn enough to take on a half million pound mortgage. In other words it is a policy that might work fine if every young person earned over £100,000 a year and didn’t mind taking on debt five times their salary. When it comes to generation rent it is rather more important to know how much affordable rented accommodation is being built. Or how long it will be before proper building regulations are restored to make sure the tower block they rent doesn’t go up in flames. Or why rich young house buyers are being subsidised with billions of pounds of tax payers money through a completely bonkers “Help to Buy” policy that simply puts the price of homes up. There is still no sign of a major drive to build council homes and residents association homes or to properly regulate the private rental market to provide more secure and equal tenancy agreements.
Lastly there is the environment. It is usually lastly with this government. May is going all out for fracking and has passed laws that over-ride local council’s decision making powers over what they want in their local environment. She is building the biggest white elephant nuclear vanity project the country has ever seen without any idea of where she is going to put the plutonium from existing ones or how the country would plug the power supply gap if there was any delay or interruption in the supply from the new one. She is doing absolutely nothing to promote the much cheaper option of decentralising electricity generation. So there is no policy to require all the new homes she is building to generate their own electricity or even to be equipped to charge up electric vehicles. Instead she is encouraging Michael Gove to repackage himself and her party by looking for every easy headline he can grab by doing a few very visible and genuinely positive things. Ban on neoicitinoids killing bees. Tick. Genuine reduction in the use of pesticides on monoculture crops. Cross. Creation of a few new coastal protection areas. Tick. Actual policing of any meaningful protection of those areas. Cross. Planting of new upland trees to restore damaged land and reduce flooding. Tick. Protection of farmers from vicious overseas competition post Brexit. Cross. Banning a few single use plastic items. Tick. Investing in proper recycling facilities in every local authority and launching a re-working of the economy to free it from plastic. Cross.
In other words the Conservatives have begun to realise that they have an image problem but they are congenitally incapable of understanding that they have a problem that goes way beyond image. Their problem is an outdated, outmoded ideology and they are simply incapable of making the changes to their own psychology that are needed it they are going to lead the country forward.
So it is possible that the £20 billion of new money for the NHS will be received positively by voters who will decide to place their faith in the ability of the Conservative Party to look after the NHS. It is also possible that voters will decide that she is only doing this because of a thin majority caused by a lot of people voting against her and that we might get some much more positive policies if a lot more of them did the same!!