According to
media reports, the
Foreign Secretary is today demanding that the Cabinet allocate an extra £100
million a week to the NHS. It’s the sort
of thing that Foreign Secretaries do, of course, whenever they’re keen to become
popular enough to get elevated to the role of Prime Minister (and when they’re
not busy
insulting
the countries with whom they’re supposed to be building strong relationships).
He does seem to
be having a bit of trouble with his arithmetic, though. Last week, he told us that the £350 million weekly Brexit bonus which could be diverted to the NHS was an underestimate; this week
he suggests that the bonus available to the NHS is less than a third of the
original number. But then, since the true
number is almost certainly negative – in the early years at least – it doesn’t
really matter whether the numbers add up or not. It also doesn’t matter whether the amount of
money corresponds to any identified need or demand; if you’re going to pluck
figures from the air, nice round ones are as good as any.
I don’t know –
and neither does Johnson – whether the amount needed by the NHS to provide a
decent service is an extra £100 million a week, an extra £200 million a week,
or some other figure. That it needs more
to do what it is currently trying to do (and I’ll accept, in deference to one
commenter yesterday, that that is based on an assumption that there is an understood
definition of what the NHS should or should not be trying to do), seems to be
generally accepted, but pulling a figure out of the air is not exactly a
scientific approach to government expenditure.
And the idea that an extra weekly sum in about three years’ time after
EU payments cease has anything to do with this year’s winter crisis is, shall
we say, a ‘creative’ bit of presentation by someone who needs the popularity
now, before the government collapses.
In another ‘interesting’
intervention last week, Johnson called for the building of a bridge between the
UK and France. Given his colourful history,
there aren’t many people who would use the phrases ‘building bridges’ and ‘Boris
Johnson’ in the same sentence, but I’m more interested here in the financial
aspects. No-one can really put a figure
on the cost of building a 22 mile bridge across a deep and busy shipping channel
with often difficult weather conditions, but it would almost certainly be many
billions more than whatever the initial estimate said.
Leaving aside
the possibility that the Foreign Secretary has already written off all hope of
a Tory victory at the next election and therefore feels free to make outrageous
promises which he and his party will never be called upon to honour, I can only
conclude that he is admitting that there is, after all, a magic money tree. The fact that his party came to power in 2010
on the premise that the current account deficit needed to be eliminated by 2015
or else the sky would fall in, and is now saying that it doesn’t really matter
if the deficit lasts until 2031, is a pretty strong clue that they’ve known the
truth all along. A government which
controls its own fiat currency, such as the UK, can create as much money as it
needs to, as and when it needs to. The
only real caveat is that there also needs to be a willingness to raise taxes if
the resulting increase in cash leads to excessive inflation. The point at which that is likely to happen
is a matter of belief based on an ideological perspective; it isn’t a number
which can be derived by any formula.
If Johnson was
really concerned about the NHS rather than positioning himself to succeed May,
he’d be demanding the release of extra money now, not artificially linking it
to the date of Brexit. But the NHS, just
like leaving the EU, is, for Johnson, more to do with calculating how to serve
his own best interests than ours. The
odd thing is how many people fall for it based on the bumbling persona which he
has created for himself.
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