Evening Standard comment: Where’s the money coming from for the NHS?; Thameslink shambles

“There isn’t a magic money tree that we can shake that suddenly provides everything that people want”. That was Theresa May’s answer a year ago when confronted by an angry nurse who wanted a bigger pay rise.

A year later, she has listened to the nurse but forgotten her own warning. Yesterday’s announcement that the NHS would be getting a £20 billion increase was quickly and predictably overshadowed by the failure to answer the simple question: how is the Government going to pay for it?

The truth is there are only three ways to find extra money for the NHS. You can cut other spending. You can borrow more. Or you can raise taxes.

So which is it? Cutting other areas of public spending seems unlikely. The Tory party lost the ability to impose further restraint when it also lost its parliamentary majority.

The Home Secretary tells the Police Federation that the police will get more; the Defence Secretary tells the Tory press that the army will get more; and the Chief Whip tells No 10 that he can’t win any votes against more money for welfare.

When the PM said the extra NHS money would come in part from “the Brexit dividend”, she was engaging in exactly the kind of fantasy economics she quite rightly accuses Jeremy Corbyn of.

The difference from the Labour leader is that this instinctively fiscally conservative prime minister knows it.

She accepts that leaving the EU doesn’t save money, because she and her Chancellor adopted the estimate from the Office for Budget Responsibility that Brexit will cost the country £15 billion a year more.

They had the legal power to reject that forecast if they disagreed, but neither do. Talk of a Brexit dividend is fake news.

So if the NHS funding isn’t coming from spending cuts, how about borrowing some more from future generations?

The Conservative Party may have lost collective interest in the message of fiscal rectitude but the occupant of No 11 doesn’t want to see a version of the old Tory baby poster with the caption “’Dad’s Nose. Mum’s Eyes. Philip Hammond’s debt”.

With that debt still uncomfortably higher, the most this Chancellor would tolerate is a slower pace of deficit reduction rather than a return to rising debt and deficit.

That leaves the bulk of the extra NHS funding to come from tax. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with raising taxes to pay for public services. The Conservatives have done it before with things like VAT hikes.

But if you do it, you need to be straight with people. Downing Street is hinting that the Tory party might jettison the good work of years by freezing personal allowances instead of raising them. True, it’s simple to do. It raises billions.

But that is because it is a big tax rise on millions of working families. What defies political logic is the topsy-turvy proposal that the Tories increase the tax allowances early in the parliament and then freeze them as we approach a general election.

We’re told the extra funding of the NHS will give us a healthier nation. Maybe.

What it has certainly prompted is a healthy debate about how we pay for all the things that people say they want.

Thameslink shambles

The new Thameslink timetable promised miracles but after almost a month the only one passengers have seen is the trick of the disappearing trains.

The service is still often a shambles: the timetable was cut back to cope with a shortage of drivers but even so trains are repeatedly cancelled or run late.

Billions have been spent and yet reliability has nosedived.So should we blame rail operators — the target being quizzed by MPs today, including Charles Horton who ran Govia Thameslink Railway, the company responsible, until he resigned last week? Or should we blame Network Rail, the scapegoat picked by Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary?

The truth is that the trail leads back to the Department for Transport which designed the franchise, controls Network Rail and promised passengers that things would start getting better fast.

Ministers take the credit when investment works. That means sharing the blame — and sorting things out — when it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, passengers watch — and wait.