Figures show: no other govt has invested less additional cash in NHS than this

The government’s fall-back when challenged over its failure on the NHS, as worse winter crisis follows winter crisis, is to fall back on its claim that it has ‘put more money into the NHS’ and is spending ‘record amounts’.

Given that any increase represents a new record, the claim is meaningless – the Tories have increased health budgets by far less than the last Labour government and at a completely inadequate level for the needs of the service, as the ongoing A&E crisis and even a recent BBC report demonstrate.

The public is beginning to get wise to the dodge, as the recent reception faced a Tory Minister on a BBC Question Time programme in a Tory heartland demonstrated.

But a far greater increase in awareness is needed – and as a picture paints a thousand words, this may be helpful:

The chart above shows the annual increase in percentage terms of NHS budgets over more than the last fifty years – or, in only five years over that period, a decrease. The grey bars are those since the Tories re-entered Downing Street in 2010.

Of the five years in which NHS budgets went down in real terms, one was under the post-2010 Tory-led government – and the figures show that no government since the NHS began has invested less extra cash in our nations health service than has been the case since 2010.

Comment:

If you have never had more than £100 in your bank account and I give you a penny to make it £100.01, you’ve got a ‘record’ amount of money – but no real help.

Especially if I’m increasing your bills at the same time, as the Tories have done by cutting social care funding and increasing the burden on the NHS at every level.

That’s the core of the NHS collapse now: a government that is failing the NHS and all of us who rely on it, but using semantics and trickery to fool the public.

The ruse is less effective than it has been, but will enough people wake up to the truth to save our greatest treasure – especially when Theresa May has refused to rule out handing the keys to US corporations in her desperate bid to gain a trade deal with the US to rescue herself and her party from the consequences of their incompetence and moral-/intellectual bankruptcy?

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