Analysis by leading experts the Nuffield Trust reveals that main parties’ manifestos would squeeze health spending
Labour and the Conservatives would both leave the NHS with lower spending increases than during the years of Tory austerity, according to an independent analysis of their manifestos by a leading health thinktank.
The assessment by the respected Nuffield Trust of the costed NHS policies of both parties, announced in their manifestos last week, says the level of funding increases would leave them struggling to pay existing staff costs, let alone the bill for massive planned increases in doctors, nurses and other staff in the long-term workforce plan agreed last year.
The Nuffield Trust said that “the manifestos imply increases [in annual funding for the NHS] between 2024-25 and 2028-29 of 1.5% each year for the Liberal Democrats, 0.9% for the Conservatives and 1.1% for Labour.
“Both Conservative and Labour proposals would represent a lower level of funding increase than the period of ‘austerity’ between 2010-11 and 2014-15.
“This would be an unprecedented slowdown in NHS finances and it is inconceivable that it would accompany the dramatic recovery all are promising. This slowdown follows three years of particularly constrained finances.”
The trust added that the planned funding increases “would make the next few years the tightest period of funding in NHS history”.
Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust and a leading authority on NHS funding, said: “They will struggle to be able to pay the existing staff, let alone the additional staff set out in the workforce plan. It’s completely unrealistic.”
JEREMY CORBYN will warn against Labour’s plans to “hollow out our NHS by continuing Tory underfunding and privatisation” at an emergency rally today.
The former Labour leader will join healthcare workers and campaigners outside Archway Tube station in his Islington North constituency, warning that “more austerity and privatisation is not the answer” to the NHS crisis.
His intervention comes two days after the launch of the Labour manifesto, which failed to rule out cuts to the health service and dropped the party’s previous promise that the “NHS is not for sale.”
Mr Corbyn is standing as an independent against Labour candidate Praful Nargund after being blocked from representing the party, which has now expelled him.
At the rally, the lifelong socialist is expected to say: “Unlike Labour and the Tories, I do not believe the expansion of the private sector is the answer to the NHS crisis.
“I’m proud to have spent my life campaigning with my community for universal public healthcare. With your support, that is what I’ll continue to do.
“In Islington North, we have a message to anybody looking to promote private healthcare: keep your hands off our NHS.”
'Privatisation of healthcare is very, very important and it’s about what the private sector can do to prove its worth to the public sector' pic.twitter.com/hHtSPxBH7I
Youth Demand protest on Labour’s campaign bus, Wrexham 15 Jun 2024.
Three Youth Demand supporters have disrupted Keir Starmer’s election battle bus. They are demanding a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for the incoming UK government to halt all new oil and gas licences granted since 2021.
At around 9:15am the group climbed onto the battle bus as it was parked up for Labour’s campaign rally in Wrexham. The group stood on the roof of the bus holding Palastinian flags and a banner reading ‘Youth Demand an End to Genocide’. They could be heard chanting “Keir Starmer you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”.
One of those taking action this morning is Jazz, 22, a support worker from Manchester who said:
“I cannot remain silent whilst our government continues to fuel genocide in Palestine and with the climate crisis. Both the Tories and Labour have shown that they don’t give a shit about those suffering in Palestine and in the global south. Their lack of humanity is disgusting.
By voting Labour you are still voting for a party that refuses to stop buying and selling weapons with Israel. We refuse to inherit a world of suffering, Labour will not get away with their inhumanity. We cannot vote our way out of this – we must act!”
Also taking action is Chester Powell, 23, a student from Leeds, who said:
The Labour Party refuses to call for an end to the buying and selling of arms with Israel, arms that are being used to enact a genocide. We can’t vote our way out of this problem so I’m taking part in civil disobedience to force necessary change.
How can I have a hope for the future when the people in power only seem to be concerned with winning the next election. I can’t have hope that either of the major parties have any interest representing ordinary people over big business. Neither seems to show any empathy for the Palestinians as they are slaughtered in the thousands, so young people like myself must show them what having a spine looks like.”
We are in the middle of a general election campaign in UK. Labour Party Deputy Leader Angela Rayner made these remarks in mid February 2022. She made these statements – calling for innocent people to be killed and harassed by police, calling for human rights to be totally disregarded. She was then and continues to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. It is totally correct that these remarks are highlighted and discussed now. She is representing the Labour Party in the most senior position except one when making these remarks. Keir Starmer, leader of the UK Labour Party is often referred to as a human rights lawyer. WTF? Do these Fascists really think that they’re fit to govern?
Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner calls for police to kill and harass innocent people.
I have conducted a great deal of independent research into the London explosions of 7 July 2005 and the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005. While not all of it has been published, I am confident that I have an excellent understanding of these issues and what actually happened. I would expect to have a far better understanding that Angela Rayner although Keir Starmer may actually have been involved in the cover-ups.
24 June 2024.
To clarify: I’ve found a Morning Star article from 2022 that indicates that Angela Rayner made these comments in late January 2022. The sequence would therefore be 1. Angela Rayner makes these comments in late January 2022. 2. I post on the issue 15 Feb 2022. 3. Dianne Abbott – then elected as an MP, not technically an MP currently since Parliament is in recess – raises the issue so that the media pays attention.
1/12/24 I’ve realised that the significance of this is that the Labour Party are going out of their way to attack me yet again. [ed: … and while hiding yet again.]
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer at the Mornflake Stadium, home to Crewe Alexandra while on the General Election campaign trail, June 13, 2024
From muzzling Palestinian rights to embracing austerity and outsourcing the NHS, Labour’s ‘tough choices’ always seem to hurt normal people while sparing wealthy donors — that’s why I am running to unseat Keir Starmer on July 4
…[T]he Labour Party launched its election manifesto — a dispiriting Thatcherite promise to continue endless austerity, soaring inequality and forever wars.
I announced my bid to become the independent MP for Holborn and St Pancras three weeks ago. Then, I was convinced that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would offer little to improve the lives of this constituency’s amazing and diverse communities, or meaningfully restrain Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Having read this manifesto, I am more convinced than ever.
Starmer’s election campaign has traded on a series of stock phrases, all of which are profoundly misleading. Starmer promises to bring about “change,” but repeats tired economic shibboleths of the George Osborne variety.
He also claims to have remade the party “in the service of the working people.” In fact, the party is financially reliant on donations from big business and billionaires and its MPs rake in donations from the private-sector companies who circle the NHS.
The party’s long-feted New Deal for Working People is so disappointing that the party’s largest affiliated union, Unite, has refused to endorse the Labour Party manifesto.
But the most galling of all of the current Starmerisms is his invocation of “tough choices.” Starmer deploys the line to explain why the country cannot afford to pull half a million children out of poverty by ending the two-child benefit cap: a decision now confirmed by the manifesto.
Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, Starmer sadly explains, has made it impossible for the sixth-richest country in human history to lift children out of poverty at a cost little under £2 billion a year, a relatively measly sum in a country with a GDP of £2,274 trillion.
As the Labour Party manifesto makes clear, there have been plenty of hard choices made by the party — but all of them to the detriment of the poor and to the benefit of the mega-rich and big business.
Starmer makes the “tough choice” not to substantially increase funding the NHS, to end child poverty or reverse the swingeing cuts of the last decade; but only because he fails to make the “tough choice” to tax billionaires marginally more, even though the 10 richest people in the country are now richer than they have ever been.
…
I’m especially angry that the Labour Party, like the Tories, has promised to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP: a real-term £7bn a year increase by 2029. This is almost double the entire £4.7bn a year the party intends to spend on its Green Prosperity Plan to tackle the imminent existential threat of climate change.
What sort of security does this really buy? The party’s offer on Palestine is, frankly, an outrage; the manifesto speaking out of both sides of its mouth. So while it recognises that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people,” it then makes Palestinian statehood contingent on a meaningless word salad.
“We are committed to recognising a Palestinian state as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign state.”
So much for an inalienable right, which requires Israel to feel “safe” before Palestinians get statehood — just as Israeli leaders claim that Israel will only feel safe when Gaza is cleansed of its citizens because there are “no uninvolved.”
This offer significantly dilutes the party’s previous commitment to recognising Palestinian statehood on the first day of government — something first brought in by Ed Miliband, appearing in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. If there was any hope that Labour would be any better than the Tories on Gaza once in power, this should dispel it once and for all.
Both the Lib Dems and the Green Party, by comparison, have committed to immediately recognising Palestine. The Labour Party now joins the ignominious company of the Tories and Reform in refusing to do so.
