For a man who occasionally pretends to care about spending public funds wisely, Boris Johnson really can’t stop himself splashing the cash, can he?
It seems like only yesterday that our newly-minted Prime Minister was bravely incurring social media fury for declaring police investigations into historic child abuse allegations (you know, children being raped by priests, football coaches, BBC celebrities and the like) to be a waste of money so utterly profligate it was being “spaffed up a wall”.
Spaffed? From a man who, when barely installed in Downing Street, announced a £100 million propaganda blitz to sell his hard Brexit to the nation? Number 10 gushingly billed this the “biggest ad campaign since the second world war” – as though the size of one’s spaffing is everything.
Are delays in cancer diagnoses because the NHS is falling apart at the seams just a little too dull for a playboy prime minister?
Yet to me, an NHS palliative care doctor, it can be measured in the lost nurses, lost doctors, lost opportunities to help my patients because Johnson cares less about them than about glossy leaflets, about why his testosterone-charged Brexit is good for us.
Today, that figure has been dwarfed by the announcement of another £2.1 billion of taxpayers’ money to prepare for a no-deal Brexit. Yes, £2,100,000,000 to gird our loins and play a game of chicken with the EU over who will blink first.
Well, prime minister, it may feel irresistibly intoxicating, this new power of yours to raid the Treasury like a sugar-crazed kid in Dunkin’ Donuts. But if you could put your hyperactive prime ministerial pecker away and just stop spaffing for a moment, allow me to sober you up.
No-one, Mr Johnson, understands better the meaning of “opportunity cost” than public servants, struggling as we do in the face of shrinking budgets to do a decent job of educating the country’s kids, caring for its sick and injured, keeping the streets safe, ensuring the bins get emptied and the thousand other vital tasks that, when knitted together, make a civilised nation.
The true cost of this ludicrous spending is the young woman I recently cared for in my hospice, who didn’t get her scans in time, who was failed by a threadbare system, and who was only diagnosed when her cancer was terminal.
Do you have any idea how much actual, tangible, real world good could have come from this £2.1bn you’ve elected to spend on preparations for a form of Brexit that’s unnecessary, avoidable – and doesn’t even have a democratic mandate?
Take the NHS, for example, £2.1bn would buy hip or knee replacements for over 400k pensioners. But are old people just insufficiently sexy for you? Are they as undeserving of public funds as children raped by adults in positions of authority?
What about infrastructure? £2.1 billion would pay for over 2,000 new NHS CT scanners. Too boring for you? Are delays in cancer diagnoses because the NHS is falling apart at the seams just a little too dull for a playboy prime minister?
How about people? You’re a people person, after all, aren’t you, Mr Johnson? Well, £2.1bn would buy 45,000 new NHS nurses, or 28,000 new doctors. You might not know or care, but the NHS is currently short of over 100,000 staff. We are desperate, just desperate, for this workforce crisis to be tackled. We can’t continue to deliver world class care without it.
I suppose from Downing Street this may all feel very distant. But every number, every statistic, every opportunity cost is ultimately composed of human beings. Unlike you, in the NHS we don’t have the luxury of turning a blind eye to human suffering. Indeed, nor would we want to. Your friend’s state-of-the-art new cancer drug might be my father’s chemotherapy. My son’s neonatal ITU stay might be your cardiac bypass surgery. In the NHS, as staff are all too painfully aware, the money can never be spent twice.
So we ration, we scrimp, we struggle and we grit our teeth as, despite our every effort, too many patients are let down. The true cost of spaffing, prime minister, is the young woman I recently cared for in my hospice, who didn’t get her scans in time, who was failed by a threadbare system, and who was only diagnosed when her cancer was terminal. It is her children, both still in primary school, who cried and pleaded with me to save their mother. It is her father, thumping the wall in pain because no parent should see their child die.
How dare you, Mr Johnson, conduct yourself as though this is a game, a hilarious exercise in winning a future general election? How dare you deface buses with lies about the NHS, then chuck ordinary people under them? You are the prime minister of Great Britain. Start acting like it.
Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor
