Battling it out over Brown’s legacy

Gordon Brown is back in the news this morning, or rather his legacy of debt is (an issue examined in depth by Pete and Fraser in 2008). The disastrous £12.7 billion NHS computer project is to be scrapped and, more important than that, the Telegraph reports that the care budgets at 60 hospitals are being squeezed by the costs of repaying PFI contracts totalling more than £5.4 billion. Andrew Lansley has taken to the airwaves to explain that Labour left the NHS with an “enormous legacy of debt”; he was keen to point out that no hospitals were built under PFI before 1997, so that there was no doubt where blame should be apportioned. Lansley claims to have spent a year uncovering this mess and will surely begin to use this story as an example of why the NHS must be reformed. This is a political opportunity to articulate Nick Clegg’s view that Labour