Most reasonable people will be with him on the importance of prevention rather than cure. It would have been much better to have prevented the Health Service from getting into its current mess than to try and fix it after the event. It would have been better not to have cut the wages of the staff for ten straight years and then look surprised when you discover a staff shortage. It is better to spend money on NHS staffing than to battle with an out of control budget to hire in temporary staff. Looking back it would also have been good to have prevented the Conservative government from forcing people who wished to train to be nurses to pay thousands of pounds up front or to saddle them with student loans. Avoiding that might just have resulted in more nurses in training and headed off the staff shortage. Oh and the government could have avoided the worst of that staffing crisis by not banging on about the dangers of immigration every day and instead working out how to make it attractive for the people who’ve come here from abroad, and who look after our patients so well, to remain in the country and carry on doing the job instead of panicking about visas.
Prevention is also much better than cure when it comes to crime. The prime driver of the wave of violent crime that is taking place in the country at the moment is the battle that drug gangs are conducting to take control of a very lucrative business. These same gangs have now spread their sales forces into every suburb and every village and are whispering to kids as young as ten that it is cool to take drugs and getting kids a little bit older than them to dare their young and impressionable friends to be brave enough to try a little fun. It would be better to prevent this by removing the economic incentive to ruin children’s lives and there is a very simple way of doing this. You get the government to provide safe predictable doses of drugs through chemists shops and you end the stupid policy of prohibition that has put billions of pounds in the hands of criminal gangs. Legalising drugs isn’t about encouraging people to get off their face and wreck their bodies – it is about controlling and managing an out of control situation that is killing people. Prohibition is encouraging use and is wrecking lives. It is also putting huge pressure on dedicated police, nurses, teachers and social workers who have to try and deal with the addicts and the results of their desperate pursuit of enough money to get the next fix. If we could prevent Conservative Ministers from talking nonsense about being hard on drugs when their policies are financing drug gangs then it might be a bit safer for Mr Hancock’s staff to put in a shift in A&E. Instead they spend many evenings trying to control drugged up violent people who stumble in needing a stomach pump and emergency treatment.
In his Defence I am sure that Mr Hancock will tell us all that the Conservatives are looking after the NHS by providing it with record levels of funding. What he won’t do is remind us that funding per operation in real terms is lower because of the way his government chose to act when they came into power in 2010 in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Ten years of austerity can’t be fixed by three years of funding in line with inflation and population changes. Governments are meant to prevent recessions getting worse by undertaking major public sector investment at the bottom of the slump. So way back in 2010 would have been an excellent time to invest in modernising hospitals and re-equipping the health service. Instead capital spending slowed at the same time as real terms per patient revenue spending was being cut back. The bottom of the slump was also the ideal time to prevent some of the housing crisis by building public sector housing. Or to have fixed some of the transport problems by building the Northern Powerhouse rail system. Instead his government did the exact opposite. We got lectures on austerity whilst £400 billion was poured into rescuing banks.
Now, as a fresh financial bubble develops, the job of government is meant to take strong action to control and manage that bubble to stop it getting out of hand. Nothing meaningful is being done to stop the city of London from returning to reckless gambling and so their complex and risky loans are back up to record levels. Once again the City is busy making short term risky profits by creating obscure financial instruments and packaging up debts that have no proper security behind them. With the US Republicans betting the house (or perhaps I should say The House) on running a £1.2 trillion annual deficit on government spending in order to provide a tax cut for the rich it is not entirely surprising that the world economy is roaring forward. We’ve had ten years of rock bottom interest rates and massive money creation programmes that have been topped off by Trump’s reckless gamble on deficit finance. That has to unwind sometime soon.
In such high risk times wise governments fix the roof and control expectations. Instead ours has just decided to do the opposite. Our government is so obsessed with its own day to day survival and with Brexit that it has just had one give away budget without doing anything serious about a long-term restructure of the UK economy to place it on a secure and sustainable basis. Chancellor Hammond is not satisfied with that. He told us in his budget speech in very polite language that if we all shut up and let Brexit go through quietly he’ll go for an even bigger give away in Spring. No doubt prior to elections in May. And a return of austerity in June.
I don’t know about you but personally I’d rather prevent that electoral disaster than cure it.