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We need to keep the pressure up, especially on undecided MPs. Please sign folks

relivingthe80s:

Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, has spent the best part of a decade studying corporate welfare – delving through Whitehall spreadsheets and others, and poring over Companies House filings. He’s just produced what is, as far as I know, the first ever comprehensive audit of the British corporate welfare state.

The figures, to be published in a forthcoming report, are astonishing. Farnsworth takes the financial year 2011-12 and tots up the subsidies and grants paid directly to businesses. They amount to over £14bn – that is, almost three times the £5bn paid out that year in income-based jobseeker’s allowance.

Add to that the corporate tax benefits, the value of the cheap credit made available to banks and other business, the insurance schemes run by the government to protect exporters, the marketing for British business laid on by Vince Cable’s ministry, the public procurement from the private sector … Farnsworth calculates that direct corporate welfare costs British taxpayers just shy of £85bn a year.

This, he admits, is a conservative estimate. I would throw in the public subsidy provided to too-big-to-fail banks, or the £25bn taxpayers shelled out that year in tax credits, housing and council tax benefits to people in work but not paid enough by their employers to live on. Nevertheless, Farnsworth has achieved something extraordinary: he has yanked into the open an £85bn subsidy that big business and the government would rather you didn’t know about.

(via relivingthe80s-deactivated20171)

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relivingthe80s:

Why are the media allowing themselves and the public to be hoodwinked by the Tory pledge to fund the NHS?

In his Five Year Forward View, the chief executive of the NHS Simon Stevens says the NHS faces a £30billion spending gap by 2020 and even with efficiency savings of £22billion (we say these are unfeasible and reckless, but that’s another story you can read about here), that leaves an £8billion shortfall PER YEAR by 2020. If spending must increase each year to reach an extra £8billion a year by 2020 that is a cumulative amount of £20 billion over five years.

Read the Conservatives’ election manifesto. [p 38], and it’s crystal clear that they are pledging the £8billion over the course of the next Parliament and not annually by 2020. That is only £8billion cumulatively - far less than the £8billion per year by 2020 that Stevens said was the very minimum needed to adequately fund the NHS.

First the manifesto sets out what the Tories have achieved in this parliament:

“We are set to increase health spending by more than £7billion above and beyond inflation in the five years since 2010.”

So that’s clarification of what they say they’ve spent over the course of the full five years of this parliament, not per year. The manifesto goes on to say:

“We will implement the NHS’s own plan to improve health care even further - the Five Year Forward View. Because of our long-term economic plan, we are able to commit to increasing NHS spending in England in real terms by a minimum of £8 billion over the next five years. Combined with the efficiencies that the NHS Forward View sets out, this will provide the funding necessary to implement this plan in full.”

It couldn’t be clearer that the £8billion pledge is over the course of five years, not per year.

This is also what George Osborne wrote in an article in the Guardian ahead of the Tory manifesto launch:

“I can confirm that in the Conservative manifesto next week we will commit to a minimum real terms increase in NHS funding of £8billion in the next five years.”

Continues…

Dr Louise Irvine is National Health Action Party parliamentary candidate for South West Surrey

(via relivingthe80s-deactivated20171)