At the same time as the i reported on Sir Keir's refusal to remove the cap on child benefits, the journal also drew attention to an interview by LKuenssbergaura in which he pledged to stick to Chancellor Hunt's public spending limits in the event of his becoming prime minister. Not even the NHS would receive an increase. This has its implications for Wales because no increase for the NHS in England means no change in the Welsh subvention as a result of the Barnett Formula. (Sir Keir is not moved to amend that formula, either, nor to make up for the Tory government's resistance to extra levelling-up grant to compensate for lack of HS2 connectivity. This set him on a collision course with the Welsh Labour government as well as other parties in Wales.)
True, the major fault with the NHS in England is structural. The Liberal Democrat manifesto of 2010 put forward a scheme to provide more money to front-line services by taking out a tier of management. In the event, bureaucracy was added to monitor the privatisation which the Tories in coalition insisted on adding to that instituted under Gordon Brown, Removing non-performing privatisations and at the same time simplifying the management structure would improve the NHS no end. But something has to be done to staunch the haemorrhaging of professionals from the service and in the short term only funding a fair pay settlement will do that. Funding should also go to social care which has seen even more frightening loss of staff and therefore capacity, leading in turn to increased "bed-blocking".
Labour apologists say that Sir Keir is only following the lead of Blair-brown in 1997 in following the budget plans of outgoing Conservative chancellor, Ken Clarke. However, as former director of policy for Labour Andrew Fisher points out, Clarke planned against a background of an improving economy, to which his budgets contributed. That certainly cannot be said about the present situation. The story is unlikely to be markedly different in 2024.
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