X days to save the economy!

I wonder what the Labour party will use as its scare slogan at the next election? After all, the usual one of ‘[Insert number] weeks/days/minutes to save the NHS’ may not work next time. Not that it worked every time before. But it has long been the favourite attack line of a British left that likes to portray the Conservative party as so ravenously right-wing that whenever it comes to power it wastes not a moment in dismantling Attlee’s post-war creation.

And yet, although the Conservative party has been in power fairly often since 1945, not once has it managed to dismantle, privatise, or otherwise sell off the NHS. Its tendency, rather, has been to increase spending, ring-fence spending and more. If the masterplan remained the same then the party has been uniquely inept at its implementation. And while believable, it seems more likely that the Conservative party long ago made its peace with the welfare state and that the Labour party has acted with a degree of disingenuity at recent general elections. For shame.

The reason why the line may particularly not work next time is not just that Matt Hancock will not appear in public without his rainbow badge. Rather it will be because by 2024 it will have become plain that in 2020 a Conservative government ran up one of the biggest bills in history in order to save the NHS. Not from collapse, but from the indignities and worse that so visibly affected parts of the Italian health service at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

Three things at least have become plain over recent weeks. The first is that if the decision to go into this lockdown was taken in order to avert Italian-like scenes in our hospitals then that has been achieved.