The year has barely staggered beyond the midway point, but it’s never too early to hand out the much coveted “Most Cretinous Analysis of the Year” award to the Daily Fail.
It reports that “The National Audit Office said spending on people in the poorer areas is £230 a year higher than those in better off areas”. Or roughly the annual spending on asparagus in your typical Hampstead household, so really not a lot.
The Fail continues, “That means an extra £3billion a year is currently going into the target zones”, or much less than the coming VAT hike will raise.
“But, largely because of bad diet, inadequate health education and a failure to prescribe enough basic drugs to combat high blood pressure and cholesterol, the health of poor people has worsened in relation to the rest of society.”
Now most of us would conclude that that failure to prescribe proper drugs, give health education and the fact that poor families have to eat crap because it’s all they can afford might point to a need for more and better spending.
What fools we are. The Fail points us towards the light and the truth saying that the statistics, which point out that the life expectancy between rich and poor has widened are, in fact, "Yet more proof that there is little connection between increased NHS spending and better results for patients".
Perfect justification then for huge cuts in the NHS budget. In fact, by the Fail’s peerless logic, if we reach a point where we don’t spend anything at all in poorer areas, they would all become immortal, a bit like the Highlander.
For all that Dick Clameron and their squadron of lumberjacks are catastrophically wrong in their analysis of the current situation – if analysis it truly be rather than a simple piece of ideological opportunism, taking advantage of a perceived crisis to destroy the welfare state – we’ve reached the logical conclusion of the failure of the Blair government of 1997.
Not a failure in any way that the savages of the Fail or the Excess would recognise, but a failure of those whose only hope is the Labour Party, the only vague hope the ordinary masses have. A landslide victory, a once in a generation opportunity to shift the nation in a positive direction, away from the evils of the Thatcherite "no such thing as society" years when if you didn’t have the money to buy refuge, you were done for.
After almost 20 years of the rape of our industry, of the transfer of wealth from the poor to the ever richer, Blair’s huge majority was the opportunity to redress the balance, not least via the tax system, by restoring the top rate of tax for earnings over £100k to something rather fairer. But he did none of that. In spite of the fact that victory was inevitable, in the run up to the election Blair promised no increases in income tax – remember the posters?
Labour have done some pretty dumb things down the years, but that was the clincher, denying the Exchequer huge amounts of cash which would ultimately have helped the public finances at this point, but would also have proved to the vast majority, once and for all, that a fair income tax system actually does not cost the huge bulk of the population anything.
Instead, the better off, a comparatively small elite, would have paid their share after 18 years of getting tax breaks left, right and centre. Mainly right...
But that historic opportunity was blown, Blair lacking the guts to bite the bullet, a problem that hadn’t afflicted the Milk Snatcher when she won power, slashing income taxes for the rich and paying for it by the regressive increase of VAT, not once, but twice, establishing a tradition which Osborne continued last month, ensuring the Tories re still the only party to increase this most pernicious of taxes, although the Lib Dumbs have blood on their hands this time around, having campaigned against an increase more furiously than Labour.
No wonder we don’t trust any of the bastards, even the ones ostensibly on “our side”.
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