Financial Times :
Gordon Brown quietly slashed by a third this year’s hospital building and equipment budget in one of his last acts as chancellor.
Prompted by the tightness of the public finances, the new prime minister, who has placed the NHS as his “immediate priority”, cut the capital budget of the English NHS for 2007-08 from £6.2bn to £4.2bn. The move could delay the government’s hospital building and reconfiguration programme in England.
However, Mr Brown avoided equivalent cuts to the Scottish and Welsh NHS budgets even though the funding formula for the UK nations suggests they should have shared the pain. That decision leaves him open to criticism that he favoured patients in his home country.
...
The Treasury Friday night confirmed the NHS capital budget had been “adjusted”. But it indicated that, although it was not yet published, it would allocate the missing £2bn to spend to English hospitals over three years from 2008-09. No published health spending plans exist for these years yet, so hospitals will not be able to verify that the money is additional.
Well, everyone's been saying public spending is too high. But Mr Union Jack is getting off to a cracking start - by giving the English one last slap in the face as he leaves Number 11.
I can't see this story on Ian Dale or Conservative Home. Who will "speak for England" ?
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8 comments:
What didn't last long?
New Labour have been doing this for ten years, just the media haven't bothered reporting it much previously.
Labour heartlands have had the lions share of the funding. Be it housing for Labour's immigrant communties, drugs availible in Scotland and Wales that are not availible in England, or the hospital building projects that are in labour areas while the hospitals closing mostly are not.
The Campaign for an English Parliament have the story:
here
Is this a cut? Really? Or is it rescheduling or work and payments because certain building programmes are running a little slow, as these things do?
I don't know myself. But I think you should find out and tell us. And say you're very sorry should you be wrong.
Two relevant comments from Iain Dale's blog on this story:
1) Madasafish:
GB has NO control over how the Scots spend the money allocated to them.
By all means campaign to change the Barnett formula but as this does not appear to be Conservative policy (if indeed there is any?) why bother.
The West Lothian question has to be resolved some day but the Conservative Party so far is a bit short of ideas on this ...
2) True Brit:
This is a scare story designed to hurt Brown, but along the way giving succour and faux-justification to the idiots, some of who hang around in the comments here Iain, who use this sort of thing as an opportunity to stir-up hatred of the Scots and Scotland.
Encouraging this sort of unthinking, uninformed animosity might get you a few more votes in England in the short term Iain, but it will ensure the break-up of the United Kingdom in due course.
You might of course want that, but if you do, please say so - so that we know that you understand the consequences of what you say - this Scot, who is proud to be British, and who has lived in England for more than twenty years (and is bringing up his children who regard themselves as English), is getting tired of the abuse and bigotry being shown to the Scots and Scotland for the actions of a government that was mostly elected in England.
Please remember:
"England has the Labour government that England voted for!"
Labour had a majority of 47 MPs in England at the last General Election - you might not like it, I certainly don't, but if the English elecotrate vote in such a way as to put and keep Labour in power it's a bit rich to blame other people for the current government.
(P.S. Some pedant-twat will now pop-up and say that the Tories got 60,000 more votes in England than Labour did. All well and good, but 60,000 votes in the wrong place under a first-past-the-post system matters bugger all. If you want those votes to mean anything then you want Proportional Representation, and if you get PR you ain't gonna get a right-of-centre government ever again - at the last election in England the Conservatives got 35.7% of the votes, Labour 35.4, LimpDums 22.9%, Sundry others 6%).
Ian Dale is of course a Crown & Anchor.
'someone else'.
It doesn't make any difference what the last result under a different system was, if you change the rules people will change the way they vote.
PR is not good at all, creates a highly centralised political system controlled by party's even more than now.
England did not vote 'for' the Labour party, only 25% or so of those eligible to vote voted for the Labour party, the biggest group didn't vote.
The biggest reason the Labour party won the election was all those foreigners voting for them, this is easy to see by the 'inner city' areas the Labour party dominate in, I'd love to know the results in England of only those who were proper ethnically English.
I seriously doubt those Labour traitors would have won.
How much longer can the Union hold out?
I think its already gone.
It has just appeared to remain so far because Labour have been in power in all three parliaments.
But now thats no longer the case the cracks will start to show.
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