What the commentators said

May’s birthday present to the NHS is “a big box full of dissimulation and crass propaganda”, said Ben Chu in The Independent. The budget increase is “a return to normal service”, not an act of “historic spending largesse”. As for the idea that it represents some kind of “Brexit dividend”, this is an insult to voters’ intelligence. The UK will be contributing money to the EU for several more years at least; and any savings we do make in the near future will be more than outweighed by the fiscal costs of exit, which the Government’s own figures put at £15bn a year. May’s playing of the “Brexit bonanza card” is transparently cynical, said Matthew Norman in the same paper. But it may nevertheless go down well with voters and Eurosceptic MPS, winning the PM “a little more time on the Brexit tightrope”.

So where will the extra NHS funds come from, if not Brexit? The answer is far from clear, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The Treasury could always raise rates of income tax, but it would have to hike them by between 3p and 4p in the pound to generate £20bn. That would be unpopular with both Tory MPS and voters, and risk tipping the economy into recession. Alternatively, the Treasury could borrow, but that would neutralise the Tories’ main line of attack against Labour. While May can promise more money for the NHS, Chancellor Philip Hammond “may find it impossible to actually deliver it at his Budget in the autumn”.

The Government will have to do something to meet the costs of our rapidly ageing population, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. This doesn’t only involve the NHS. The social care system – which is “inextricably linked” to the NHS and is the subject of a delayed green paper due this autumn – also needs to be properly resourced. If it isn’t, then pouring extra money into hospitals and GP surgeries will be – as a health minister recently put it – “like running the bath with the plug out”. Already, one in ten hospital patients are there only because there is nobody to look after them outside. May should be taking bold steps to address the long-term challenges facing the NHS and social care. Instead, she’s engaged in timid “managerialism”.