- Davey on PM speech: “we’ll never fix the NHS unless we fix social care”
- NHS England: welcome steps but won’t matter unless Streeting “stops ignoring the elephant in the room”
- Findlay should say if he agrees with Badenoch on maternity pay
Davey on PM speech: “we’ll never fix the NHS unless we fix social care”
Responding to the Prime Minister’s speech this morning, Ed Davey, who is also in Hull and East Yorkshire today, said:
There’s no doubt we need big changes like this to fix the NHS after the Conservatives left it on its knees. Now we need to see the Government take the action patients desperately need: making sure everyone can see a GP when they need one, cutting waiting lists, and fixing our crumbling hospitals.
We’ll never fix the NHS unless we fix social care – and I’m afraid the Government still isn’t treating that seriously or urgently enough. Liberal Democrats will keep pushing for the cross-party talks to finish this year, so the Government can get on with it.
The Prime Minister badly needs to read the room. People don’t want more speeches about civil service reform and government machinery, they want bold action that will turn things around for them now.
NHS England: welcome steps but won’t matter unless Streeting “stops ignoring the elephant in the room”
Responding to Wes Streeting’s statement in the Commons on scrapping NHS England, Liberal Democrat Health and Social Care spokesperson Helen Morgan MP said:
The NHS is clearly broken – patients are suffering through dangerous corridor care and unable to get basics like a GP appointment. The health service is in need of major reform and we welcome this step in the right direction.
The sad fact remains that none of this will matter unless the Health Secretary stops ignoring the elephant in the room: social care. You cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care, no matter how much unnecessary bureaucracy is slashed.
It is time for Streeting to show the same urgency on social care and complete his review by the end of the year.
Findlay should say if he agrees with Badenoch on maternity pay
Speaking ahead of Kemi Badenoch’s visit to Glasgow, Scottish Liberal Democrat economy spokesperson Willie Rennie said:
The Conservatives are lurching from one out of touch extreme solution to the next.
Russell Findlay says 14-year-olds should quit school and get a job, and Kemi Badenoch says mum’s maternity pay is excessive. At this rate, the Tories will have toddlers on zero-hours contracts!
Russell should tell the public whether he agrees that maternity pay is too high and Kemi should do the same about whether she thinks young people should be able to leave school after just three years of high school.
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14 Comments
Might a transparent, equitable and fully applied spend and tax system combined with the democratisation of the ruling body of the Bank of England help?
@ Steve,
It would be a slight improvement but the problem of having two drivers, two pilots, two ship’s captains (choose whichever analogy you like) still remains.
Monetary and Fiscal Policy changes have an effect on the economy. To achieve sensible regulation requires that both are under the same control. We don’t want one driver fighting the other, with one pressing the accelerator but the other applying the brakes, but this has been happening for many years now.
@Steve: The reason the bank of England is not democratic is because decisions about interest rates and money supply etc. are quite properly the domain of people who are experts in economics and therefore equipped to understand what the results of their decisions are likely to be.
I suspect that if you are flying, you would prefer the pilots of the aeroplane to be people who are qualified to fly, and you would not wish them to be politicians voted in to fly the aircraft because they happen to be members of whichever political party is currently popular. Ditto your GP or the technician who fixes your computer. Why should it be any different for the people who deal with the maintaining our currency?
SimonR for most of my life until 1997 and for several hundred years before that the Bank of England was subject to political control. It is not yet clear if the current system is any better or worse. If you think the financial system is paramount then maybe control by the BoE is preferable. If you want an economic system that puts people first then probably not. You comparison with an aircraft is fallacious.
@Mick: The Bank of England (BoE) does not determine the economic system, so the question of what economic system we use is not relevant to BoE control. Rather, the BoE controls things like interest rates and the details of how our currency is managed. Those are more like, technical things, whereas I’d expect politicians to be making decisions about the kind of society we like to live in and what issues are of concern to the public that need to be addressed. So while no analogy is perfect, I don’t think the aircraft analogy is entirely inappropriate.
As for whether the current system is better: It’s weathered two huge financial storms (the 2008-10 economic crash, and Covid) without our currency becoming massively unstable and therefore making the crisis worse, which is more than can be said for the somewhat comparable crises of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the 1970s oil crisis. Of course, the circumstances of each of those were very different so you can’t really draw definitive conclusions, but they do suggest the current system of BoE experts having more control is more robust. Then you have Black Wednesday in 1992 – an example of a crisis that was largely caused by politicians attempting to meddle with the currency and so would probably not have happened at all under the current system (although comparisons are blurred by the issue of the ERM).
The Bank of England describes its independence as “We are the UK’s central bank and are owned by the UK government. But we have specific statutory responsibilities for setting policy – for interest rates, for financial stability, and for the regulation of banks and insurance companies. And we carry those out, for the good of the people of the United Kingdom, within a framework set by Government but free from day-to-day political influence.”
It is the government that sets the mandate for the Bank of England to follow, so when we speak of operational independence it is really how to achieve that mandate in close coordination with the Treasury.
Central Bank’s retain their independence by accommodating the political wishes of the current administation whether that be Turkey, Russia, USA, China, the UK. France/Germany or elsewhere. Their role in controlling inflation and maintaining stability in financial markets is an important one that serves to temper the worst excesess of more volatile governments although that discipline may soon be tested in Trump’s America.
>” The reason the bank of England is not democratic is because decisions about interest rates and money supply etc. are quite properly the domain of people who are experts in economics and therefore equipped to understand what the results of their decisions are likely to be.”
From the evidence of the post Covid rate increases, and observations from some economists, there are serious doubts about whether the people on the rate setting committee are “equipped to understand”.
The rate setting is something which clearly needs a stepping back ability, so that there is space for the do nothing or take a counter intuitive decision, rather than simply take the dogmatic monetarist approach…
But as Joseph notes, this is possible if the government set mandate allows it.
Ed Davey is probably right, the handover/discharge from hospital (NHS care) to social care is a major (NHS) bed blocker. Additionally, good social (and at home medical) care could assist in reducing the level of hospital readmission.
@ Simon,
“….you would prefer the pilots of the aeroplane to be people who are qualified to fly, and you would not wish them to be politicians voted in to fly the aircraft because they happen to be members of whichever political party is currently popular”.
Are saying that fiscal policy also should be outside democratic control? Rachel Reeves is just as much a “pilot” as Andrew Bailey.
“As for whether the current system is better: It’s weathered two huge financial storms (the 2008-10 economic crash…)”
Economic crashes tend to follow periods of rising interest rates. So maybe there wouldn’t have been a crash in 2008 if there had been less reliance on monetary policy and more on fiscal policy.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/past-recessions.asp
“the handover/discharge from hospital (NHS care) to social care is a major (NHS) bed blocker.”
Indeed so, that was certainly my experience as a local government Cabinet Member for Social Care during 2010-15 Coalition government (in which Sir Ed was a Cabinet Minister) …… and the party supported cuts to local government and the so called Lansley Reforms in 2012.
Might it be that if/when H.M.G. delegates /avoids responsibility for the foundations of the nation’s socio-economic policies by leaving it to the B. o. E., our country is not a democracy but a plutocracy, run by bankers for bankers and their associates in the finance industry?
Yes, we do seem currently, to have two pilots regularly flying our metaphorical national aeroplane, with consistent cumulative ineptitude. The real pilot is hidden behind a false theatre of objectivity and the other is presented to us as competent to govern, but evidently not, again using false theatre.
At the centre of our so powerful financial policy and practices, who speaks for the some 20% plus of our children who are currently, permanently underfed?
Whom do the excessive interests rates benefit apart from the rentiers?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/02/17/why-the-bank-of-england-base-rate-should-be-no-more-than-the-rate-of-inflation/
If/when we have politicians in charge, and their civil servants, with little to no knowledge of finance and economics, might it be that our [alleged] democracy is a sham?
Might it have been a dumb decision of so many of our politicians, and their donors, to move the U. K. from being industrialized to being financialized?
The goals of the BOE can be changed by any Government with a majority. The fact that none has tried to do so suggests that any change in the monetary policy it would have pursued if it were in house would either have been accidental or such that they would not dare state it in a bill. Given some of the things governments have put into bills and some of the things they have done accidentally, I think independence is the safer option.
@ Steve Trevethan. You state delegating certain powers to the Bank of England creates a plutocracy. It might have escaped you that this was Liberal Democrat policy at the time it took place.
@ David Raw,
You are correct to say that “certain powers” have been delegated to the BoE. This doesn’t mean that the BoE is fully independent though. That concept is rather a myth.
The LibDems, and previously the Liberals, will have had many policy positions in their time and will have abandoned many of them. Powers can be delegated and they can be de-delegated! It’s no big deal.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/central-bank-independence-myth-its-time-abandon-it/