Owl says: surely “extra” money for the NHS means ALL CCG costings have to be revised? And all the arguments about WHY services have to be cut must be revisited.
“Theresa May has come under fire for promising that a Brexit windfall will provide an extra £400m a week for the NHS. May – who will pledge an extra £20bn in annual real terms from 2023-24 in a major speech – has been ridiculed for linking the money to Brexit savings. “At the moment, as a member of the European Union, every year we spend significant amounts of money on our subscription, if you like, to the EU,” she said on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show. “When we leave we won’t be doing that.”
Two senior Tory MPs, who are also doctors, took aim at May: “The Brexit dividend tosh was expected but treats the public as fools. Sad to see Govt slide to populist arguments rather than evidence on such an important issues,” tweeted Sarah Wallaston, who chairs the Commons health and social care committee. Dr Philip Lee, MP for Bracknell, tweeted: “There is no evidence yet that there will be a ‘Brexit dividend’ – so it’s tax rises, more borrowing or both.”
The PM’s decision to frame extra spending specifically as a benefit of leaving the EU has been widely seen as a sop to hardline Brexiters in her cabinet, echoing Boris Johnson’s suggestion during the EU referendum that Brexit would free up £350m a week extra for the NHS.”
East Devon Watch 
What is the betting that our CCG carries on with all their planned cuts regardless of the extra money being promised?
After all, the CCG’s rationale for “restructuring” (which have never been properly scrutinised despite the best efforts of the non-Conservative County Councillors to try to pin them down) has always been that they are NOT in fact cuts but instead are a more efficient way of working, so to back down just because there is more money promised would be an admission that it was not previously telling the truth.
Besides which, a promise of extra money does not mean that the Government is reversing its policy of privatisation – and if you are being cynical about it, you could see the additional money promised as simply being the additional funds needed to pay for the administration of privatisation (estimated at £10BN to £30BN PER YEAR and likely to grow as the number of privatised services grows) and to pay for the additional costs inherent in privatised services to pay for the significantly higher executive salaries, the shareholder dividends and the administration of the privatised contracts from the other side.
Next we need to ask where the “Magic Money Tree” is that will fund this extra money? Despite what Theresa May says, there is no Brexit Dividend – indeed the Government has accepted the Office for Budget Responsibility report that says that there will be a net cost to the Government of £15BN per year rather than any dividend. So now the Government needs to shake the Magic Money Tree very hard indeed to make a total of £35BN per year magically appear.
Of course, if our CCG doesn’t reverse its cuts, and other CCGs act similarly, the promise of additional money will not be taken up, thus enabling the Government to simultaneously claim that they have made £20BN available to the NHS (thus winning over a raft of votes) whilst not actually having to come up with it through additional taxation (more votes) and still achieving their privatisation dogma and avoiding having to admit just what a state the NHS has got into. A WINNING POLITICAL STRATEGY if there ever was one – even if it does mean the continuation of tens of thousands of avoidable deaths (which in other circumstances would be large enough to be considered genocide).
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