![]() ![]() For that reason, I believe (hope anyway) that she will forgive me for saying she is well qualified to lead a campaign on this, bringing her charm and obvious kindness to bear alongside her considerable willpower. Our current Secretary of State is, with good reason, one of the most popular and respected members of Parliament. If Britain is going to become a country where government does less, citizens must do more – and losing weight is something we can all work on. Futhermore, a range of illnesses from cardiovascular conditions to arthritis to diabetes are made both more likely and more dangerous by obesity – and drive up the NHS budget. Scandinavian countries adopted a wide range of contrasting approaches to Covid but, with their much fitter populations, all suffered far lower Covid death rates – and lower hospital pressures too. Crucially, the system would also have been much less stressed and the NHS backlog today would be smaller. Of course, doctors and nurses were right to care for every patient, but had many of those patients been fitter, they could have escaped risking a horrible death – as Boris Johnson acknowledged. Doctors who served at the sharp end during the Covid crisis will confirm privately that the NHS faced a real danger of being overwhelmed – not by sick representatives of the general population but by sick, overweight people, often forming the majority in overloaded intensive care units Rather, it is obesity, where we have the worst rate in Europe apart from Malta. This is not old age – fit, healthy elderly people are not big users of hospitals. Second, we must tackle the principal driver of NHS spending. Governments should never intervene in individual admissions cases, but they can and should insist that a much smaller proportion of each cohort are funded for non-vocational courses, by introducing rigorous national academic standards for the award of student maintenance loans. Both have much lower higher education participation and enjoy high productivity. Germany and Switzerland, like us, deliver the bulk of their vocational education outside universities, making their statistics more directly comparable to ours than say France, Italy, Spain or indeed America. And few other countries have such a low proportion of less able students studying for non-vocational subjects. This involves heavy costs, both to the student and, through unpaid debt, to the taxpayer. Very few other countries send four-fifths of students away from home. ![]() Apologists for the universities hide behind statistics on the economic value of degrees, based on averages which blend those struggling at the margin with higher performers.īritain’s university sector is an international outlier in two important respects. Less than two thirds of working age graduates are in highly skilled jobs. Here are three further, broader suggestions.įirst, there is a strong case for addressing the bloated higher education sector, going well beyond fiscal policy. Rises to 12 and then 15 hours are sensibly proposed. Both sides of the argument on benefits uprating can surely unify around the Government’s proposal to raise the numbers of hours worked required to avoid checks on availability for work. Top of any such list must be getting many of the five million people currently drawing out of work benefits back into employment. Such measures must involve doing less, as well as doing things differently. These may take time to bear fruit, but must reassure the markets now that the growth path in spending will be measurably lower. What is needed instead is a list of medium-term policies for restraining the growth in spending. Yet, after austerity and Coronavirus, fiscal plans must not just degenerate into counter-productive measures, such as deferring maintenance until it becomes much more expensive, or over-squeezing salaries of those critical employees who are already in short supply. The forthcoming ‘fiscal event’ must impress the markets and provide some much-needed space for flexibility in decision making over the next two years. They can still win through in their bold strategy to cut taxes and regulation and go for growth, on one condition: Britain must get public spending back under control, after a generation of profligacy, further exacerbated by Covid. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are right in their view that continuing with the status quo means managed decline at best. Sir Julian Brazier is a former Defence Minister, and was MP for Canterbury from 1987-2017.
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