HEALTH Secretary Stephen Dorrell is on the edge of a hisWith the aid of Labour's Chris advisors he seems set not only to neutralise the NHS as an electoral issue, but even to turn the tables and put Labour under pressure.
More remarkably still, Dorrell has achieved this result without relenting in the Tory "scorched carth strategy which is preparing a maior NHS cash crunch for an in coming Labour government.
This is the reality behind the Budget settlement, which appears to pump additional cash into health health authorities and Trusts to. WHOS BOW CANS Dorrell has cynically turned the tables on Labour, challenging Smith to promise more moncy for the NHS, safe in the knowledge that no such pledge will be forthcoming from a party terrified of appearing public spending.
In fact £l billion of the £1.6 bilfory vultures lion "extra" money for the NHS unveiled last November will be gob. bled up at once by rising prices: Kenneth Clarke's claim of a much bigger real-terms increase rested on the vain assumption that inflation Another £200m has been cut from the NHS capital programme, worsening the £2.4 billion backlog in maintenance and the total standstill on hospital building. And over [300m extra will be required simply to keep pace with growing numbers of elderly patients and the advances in new technology. Stop Tory vultur Taking the message to the politicians: nurses from South West London staged an impromptu 'operation' in Parliament square to highlight the dire shortage of beds and cash as a result of Tory cuts.
From Clarke's trumpeted £1.6 billion, therefore, just under £100m amounts to "new money" - and this falls far short of the deficits already predicted for health authorities this year. Uneven To make matters worse. the money is being distributed unevenly across the country, according to a fiddled formula which somehow gives the biggest percentage allocation to the health authorTories' darling borough of Westminster, whils leaving more deprived districts in London and across the country Stop Tory vultures willing GPs into commissioning Troops And by accepting the framework of the market system with its "purchaser-provider split", would create an additional network of purchasing bodies, and increase the administrative costs and bureaucracy of the front-line Trusts This is an even greater nonsense sole pledge of extra cash for NHS services hinged on cutting bureauc-