Health spending revolt in reality

“Theresa May was under pressure from a growing Tory revolt over health spending last night” proclaim Tory rag par excellence the Daily Express (March 26 2018).

The article continues: “More than 30 of the party’s MP’s have threatened to force the Prime Minister from office if she doesn’t give the NHS loads more money NOW!”

Sorry, my mistake. It doesn’t say that second bit. I should have read the entirety of the relevant sentence before “quoting” what it says and not just assumed that “Tories revolt over health spending” meant that some Tories were up in arms because the

NHS was being wilfully starved of funds.

Indeed, the utter absurdity of such a assumption (which is like imagining wolves protesting about the eating of lamb) is glaringly illustrated by the fact that one of the “revolting” Tories is Sir Oliver Letwin who, along with Wokingham Tory MP John Redwood, is one of the chief architects of decades of destructive “reforms” that have brought the NHS to its present state of collapse.

No, what Letwin and other Tories (including a number of Blairite “Labour” ones like Liz Kendall) are actually demanding in an open letter to Theresa May is a “Parliamentary commission into the future of healthcare, the conclusions of which have already been decided on – the replacement of the current system of funding healthcare out of general taxation with a dedicated hypothecated health tax that secretary Jeremy Hunt, according to the Daily Express, recently “broke ranks” to call for.

There is of course no “revolt” against Theresa May. It is a charade.

A hypothecated health tax, which can easily be converted into a full-blown private insurance-based co-payment system, was always going to be “solution” to a healthcare crisis deliberately engineered as part of a decades-old neo-liberal master plan privatise the NHS.

Theresa May will, of course, dutifully perform her allotted role in the masquerade accede to the “rebels”’ demands.