The NHS employs 1.75 million people and is too monolithic. The number of civil servants has risen to 460,000. This is territory which the Chancellor needs to examine in detail.
However, he doesn’t recognise the £10bn figure bosses are reportedly asking for on the NHS’ 72nd anniversary.
Three million of them are unlikely to pitch up here, but government must plan for all eventualities – and support for its plan wouldn’t survive a mass influx.
We need to switch from specifying “what’s allowed to open” to “what in the interest of public health needs to continue to be restricted.”
Some of its problems can be fixed. Others won’t be. And one perhaps can’t be: namely, that this Parliament seems to be incapable of saying No.
Effectively, for much of the population, UBI would merely take their money and then give it back to them. What’s the point?
Plus: Treasury and Work & Pensions lessons. Greenlighters v the rest. Remembering Attlee’s surplus. And: the key question now is “how”, not “what”.
The implications of the crisis are such that Johnson and Sunak need not so much to think outside the box as to trample it to tatters altogether.
It may be necessary, given the Coronavirus, and could even work. But Britain has a long, long record of state spending failing to turbo-charge growth.
Plus: As of writing, I’ve had hardly any communications at all from constituents about the Coronavirus.
My answer would be “maybe, provided the spending or tax cuts significantly improved our growth potential.”
We cheer the mission. But government needs more compromise, art, tact and accomodation than campaigning alone allows.
Ministers have been asked to push the Government’s priorities – tackling crime, funding the NHS, “levelling up”. How can these be effected without faster growth?
Johnson is a self-described “Brexity Hezza” and now has the chance to mould a Party and country in his own romantic image.
This is 25 times the number of skilled work permits issued each year to non-EU citizens and their dependants.