Why petitioning to ‘keep the promise of £350m for NHS’ is a bad idea
38 Degrees are a crowd-sourced pressure group. I can’t remember exactly how I got on their list - at some point I’ll have signed a petition of theirs that I agreed with. But their latest email has agitated me.
Please can you sign the petition to hold Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to their NHS promise?
The ‘Vote Leave’ campaign promised to invest £350 million a week in our cash-strapped NHS. It was written in huge letters on a bus that toured the country. But yesterday morning Nigel Farage was already trying to wriggle out of it. [1]
Whichever way we voted, politicians shouldn’t be able to get away with misleading voters. 38 Degrees member Michelle agrees. She’s started a petition for our NHS to get the much needed funding it was promised.
We’re just beginning a new chapter in the UK. If hundreds of thousands of us stand with Michelle, we can send a clear signal to politicians of all stripes: we won’t put up with broken promises on our NHS.
Can you add your name now? It’ll take less than a minute…
The actual petition is at https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/nhs-350m-promise but don’t sign it until you’ve read why I think it’s a shit idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I love our NHS, and I think promises should be kept.
But this is just populist nonsense, and I think reveals a lot about the referendum campaign in general.
Let’s get 4 problems out of the way first.
1) That figure isn’t being spent in the first place.
During the EU Referendum campaign, 38 Degrees didn’t campaign for either side, as a poll told them to just do fact-checking. Yet they are running this petition even though this figure was widely derided. It doesn’t take into account the rebate. In simple terms, it’s the RRP not the offer price. It may appear on the invoice/receipt but it doesn’t appear in the bank statements.
The amount of money that could be diverted elsewhere, assuming we haven’t lost it from the impact of Brexit on finances, is £161m. But I’ll stick with £350m as that’s what the petition says.
2) The NHS already gets a lot more money than that
NHS England gets £2.25bn a week. Written out in full that’s 2,250,000,000 vs 350,000,000 (or really 161,000,000). And that’s just England.
Obviously it would be nice if the NHS got more funding. But what is the use in people making a promise of £350m a week to the NHS if it already gets much more? What would stop them from dropping the standard funding to £1.9bn and then topping it up with the ‘savings’ from not being in the EU?
3) Which NHS?
‘The NHS’ is complicated, each home nation seems to have their own NHS and I’m not sure Westminster can just give £50m (say) to Scotland and Wales and insist they spend it on the NHS — they (ahem) have the ability to spend their money on their own priorities. So Westminster politicians aren’t in a position to keep this pledge. (Unless they give it ALL to NHS England…).
4) Nigel Farage isn’t even a sodding MP
The actual petition is aimed at ‘Nigel Farage and Leave campaigners’. Nigel Farage MEP doesn’t have any say in the nation’s budget. Most Leave campaigners don’t have much say either. The email claims it’s aimed at actual MPs in Government who might be able to keep this pledge, along with the idea that this sends a signal “to politicians of all stripes”.
The idea that a vote or petition endorsement can mean something other than an agreement with the exact wording is one of the things that has got us into this whole mess.
So for various reasons the petition is not particularly actionable. But that’s not what got me rattled.
What about all the other UK things the EU money funded?
In the most blunt formulation of the idea that this petition seeks to enforce, Vote Leave said
Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.
So what this petition is gathering votes on, is ‘Spend What Was Our Entire Gross EU Outgoings On One Thing Almost Everyone Feels They Comprehend And Love’. And there is definitely an argument that enough voters believed Leave would do exactly what it said on the bus for there to be a mandate for this.
But the £350m figure includes the money we got back, money that went to the regions and special projects.
Vote Leave’s argument was basically ‘we should spend £350m on our priorities, not what the EU says we should spend it on’.
Today we’re seeing Yorkshire and Cornwall seeking guarantees that they will still get the millions the EU would have sent them. Lists are circulating of the British universities for whom EU funding is a large part of their research income. And of course there’s the farmers.
Sure, the Julia Hartley-Brewers can say ‘but this was our money in the first place’. It was. But it wasn’t ‘our’ priority. Surely, the very point of ‘taking back control’ would be to do something different. It can’t just be about the accent of the decision-makers, it has to be the decisions themselves.
‘Taking back control’ meant giving control to our government, and we were variously told that this was better because they’re democratically elected, we’ve heard of them and they’re ‘ours’. (I thought the ‘betcha can’t name all 5 EU presidents’ rhetoric rather overstated both the average citizen’s ability to name the equivalent UK figures and the actual powers of the presidents). So the UK voted Leave and when we eventually leave the EU, probably 2018, we’ll have that £350m back under Westminster control each week. But the trouble with Westminster determining this is that it’s at the whim of whoever’s in power. As it stands, in 2018 this will still be the Tories, so £350m can be spent on their priorities (for the sake of argument I’ll assume you can actually spend a saving).
Fighting for EU funding for local projects gave Councillors the opportunity to win more for their area than just what they get from Westminster and locally, on projects that possibly aren’t really the Council’s top priority either but can have long-term worth.
I guess for one-off projects it’s difficult to know what would have been awarded EU money in post-Brexit years, but lots of places from national parks to the inner-cities will no longer be able to get £6m here and £8m there for conservation, preservation and renovation.
Even if it was ‘our money’, it was being redistributed by EU agencies to further long-term EU policies, not our government’s short-term goals. These projects kept people in work, made lives better, reached areas other funding didn’t. And, in little improvements to quality of life, quite probably kept a fair few people healthy and happy and away from needing medical care — there are more ways to improve the physical and mental health of the nation than just a well-funded NHS.
If we’re taking the EU out of the picture, we need to be arguing for the continuation of equivalent project funding. We need to identify the areas the national governments haven’t funded because the EU covered them, and be clear which are still going to be covered and how those funds will now be distributed.
Just giving it all to the NHS is short-sighted and dull, and would appeal to parties that seek to reduce public spending. There’s a danger of a radical cut to the quantity and variety of projects that receive public funding yet keep public on side.
If we take as read that the EU is shorthand for ‘money wasting bureaucrats’, the bus slogan:
We send the EU £350 million a week
let’s fund our NHS instead
(leaving aside the false dichotomy), sounds like a no-brainer of a deal, because it omits any benefit the UK gets from that EU money.
A more accurate choice would be
We prop up Cornwall, Yorkshire, Wales, other UK regions, build workplaces, conserve nature, invest in science and the arts, contribute towards people to manage all the above, help other parts of Europe, enhance your rights and help lots of other little things such as the future of the planet
let’s increase the NHS budget by about 1/6th instead
which OK, needs a bigger bus, but is a clearer question of priorities.
I’m sure it would still get many takers, maybe even a majority. See, I was quite happy with the EU making these spending decisions rather than the government of the day. It may be more democratic for the UK to have full control, but that’s a concentration of expenditure in the hands of the majority. How many constituencies does the commitment ‘£600m for Cornwall’ help win?
If we are to reduce the impact of Brexit, we need to be helping the direct and indirect beneficiaries of EU funding. We need a broader set of priorities, not a narrow one. The NHS needs extra funding, yes, but not at the expense of public projects.
So no, I won’t sign this petition. I never believed the claim to be possible in the first place and never thought it a good idea, as I was very far from the ‘everything the EU does is stupid’ camp.
Why campaign to make politicians pledge to take money that was going to projects that UK governments didn’t fund and give it to a service that they already do fund?
