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The Blair/Brown years left the country bankrupt. They literally left the coalition a note saying "there's no money left" https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegu
by origin_path 4y ago
The Blair/Brown years left the country bankrupt. They literally left the coalition a note saying "there's no money left"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/20...
PFI was used because it was a way to get "free money" for the NHS by pushing the real costs into the future.
The core problem for the socialized model is that nobody can assemble a voter coalition that agrees to raise taxes. The poorer Labour voters say no, the rich should pay, or alternatively, the money already exists it's just the evil Tories refusing to fund the system. The more affluent conservative voters say no, because either, the NHS is wasting money and should fix that first e.g. the massive spend on diversity officers, or, the NHS is always overloaded due to uncontrolled immigration, so fix that first. The NHS doesn't have enough admin support as a result. Then the woke middle classes say no, reducing immigration is awful and we will fight it all the way and of course we won't pay higher taxes because if we allowed unlimited immigration the new taxes from all the highly skilled doctor/engineer immigrants would fix the problems.
In the UK there's also the issue that the social care workforce was one of the only professions forced to take vaccines. Lots quit and the rest learned that they have fewer human rights than other people. So having treated the social care workforce like shit, which was already overstretched, the system is now in total collapse for lack of workers.
State run systems always have problems like this. It's one size fits all, so the different groups with their different priorities can never agree and the result is deadlock and collapse. The people who run it are too far removed from the front line and the "too big to fail" problem rears its ugly head. The NHS could never survive as is, it's just a pity that it had to end like this.