Why claims of Brexit dividend for NHS will raise Remainers’ anger

It was a claim familiar to millions of voters in the June 2016 referendum on whether the UK should stay in the European Union. Emblazoned across the official Vote Leave battlebus was the suggestion that £350m this country sends to Brussels every week could be spent instead on our own National Health Service, if only we broke free and left the EU.

The figures, and the basic argument, were hotly contested at the time and have been widely ridiculed ever since. The idea that the UK would receive any Brexit dividend in the foreseeable future, to help fund public services, from an enterprise beset by so much economic risk was so dubious that even Ukip’s Nigel Farage disowned it.

Today, however, after a week in which she and her ministers survived a series of parliamentary votes on Brexit only by the skin of their teeth – and before one which promises even more trouble for the prime minister in parliament – Theresa May needs to boost the benefits of Brexit.

With this week’s parliamentary hurdles uppermost in their minds, ministers have officially bought into the idea that leaving the EU will be great for the NHS, helping to allow millions more in funding for hospitals every week, just as the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign said it would.

After days of argument between the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over how much could be afforded and was needed (which some MPs believe has been played up by spin doctors to draw attention to the announcement), May reveals today that the NHS is to receive £20bn a year extra by 2023-24. Government sources insist that Brexit will indeed help the country afford the NHS’s big 70th birthday present.

While most MPs will be thrilled at getting more for their local hospitals, Conservative rebels campaigning for a soft Brexit smell a large rat.

“It is sickening if this money is being in any way linked to Brexit,” said one senior Conservative MP among the rebel group who have been threatening to defeat the government over Brexit legislation in parliament.

“It is truly pathetic. The availability of money for the NHS has nothing to do with Brexit at all. If anything, Brexit makes us less able to fund the NHS because it hits the economy. And for them to suggest the reverse is truly shameful.”

Another Tory rebel added: “They will go to any lengths, even buying into the Boris Johnson lie that Brexit will be the saviour of the NHS.”

Health experts and health economists are primed and ready to cast fresh doubt on the idea that Brexit will somehow make us more able to afford a better-funded NHS.

On Saturday, as rumours of the supposed Brexit NHS boost circulated, Anita Charlesworth, director of research and economics at The Health Foundation, put out a pre-emptive tweet to counter the government spin: “In case talk of Brexit dividend comes up in discussion of NHS funding thought I’d retweet excellent @PJTheEconomist piece explaining in his wonderfully clear way why there is NO Brexit dividend. NHS needs extra funds but it’s taxes not Brexit that will have to pay for it.”

She provided a link to a piece by two senior figures at the Institute for Fiscal Studies who argue that “Brexit has reduced rather than increased the funds available for the NHS (and other public services), both in the short and long term”.

It is possible that the NHS announcement could go contrary to plan, and stir yet more resentment among the hardcore Tory Remainers as this week’s parliamentary clashes on Brexit approach.

Tory rebel MPs and peers are in no mood to take the spin lying down. They are already furious at tactics being used by the government and the whips as they attempt to bring them into line. They are outraged by what they say are campaigns of “personal vilification” being run by hard Brexiters and elements of the Brexit-backing press, which are trying to get them deselected.

Anna Soubry, the arch-Remain Tory, says hard Brexiters have been bombarding her constituency chairman and his office with emails demanding her deselection, and accusing her of being a traitor. “How do they get the chairman’s personal email?” she asks, adding that there appears to be a “concerted campaign” to bully MPs to vote against their beliefs. She says those sending the emails are not in her constituency, nor do they seem to be Conservatives, though she thinks someone has given people the addresses.

“It is a very serious matter for democracy,” says Soubry. She believes that some MPs will be swayed (although she insists she herself will not be) by such efforts to subvert the democratic process. “Many of them will simply not vote in the way that they want to vote, because they will worry about being deselected or their lives being made extremely difficult. It is appalling for our democracy.”

Health experts and health economists are of like mind, and also pour scorn on the idea that Brexit will somehow make us more able to afford a better-funded NHS.

Some Conservative MPs also feel betrayed after May offered them a compromise deal on the “meaningful vote” on Brexit as the price for their loyalty last week, only for ministers to go back on the agreement. In these pages the former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who has been at the centre of the row, today suggests he will do his duty, come what may, to ensure parliament can play its part to avoid a “no-deal Brexit”, which he says would cause a “major crisis for our country”.

He adds: “In the absence of some agreement, the barriers to trade, commerce and movement would be such as to bring us to a complete halt.”

Tory peers look certain to help inflict defeat on the government on Monday over the meaningful vote. The matter will then be voted on in the Commons on Wednesday, in what could be the most critical test of May’s authority yet. However much she throws at the NHS in the meantime, it is far from certain that it will be enough.