By Gaby Hinsliff, 19 Jun 2018<\/p>\n
T<\/span><\/span>here\u2019s no more money. That was the essence of the lecture the cabinet got on Monday<\/a>, eight years after Labour\u2019s Liam Byrne left a note<\/a> for the incoming Conservative government saying much the same thing: the cupboard is bare, so forget it. This time the chancellor, Philip Hammond, was presumably firing a warning shot over cabinet ministers tempted to pull the same trick as Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, widely suspected of having threatened to resign if the NHS didn\u2019t get its cash, but it could also be read as a howl of frustration at the extent to which Brexit has broken the Tories.<\/p>\n For a Conservative chancellor to rip up manifesto tax pledges<\/a> made only a year ago is the equivalent of setting fire to your hair in public; Tory voters don\u2019t necessarily expect generosity but they expect financial competence, and they hate surprises. Yet that is what Hammond will surely now have to deliver to fund the NHS\u2019s birthday present, and given the looming crises in housing and criminal justice, it may not be the last time he does it.<\/p>\n Magic beans would be a more reliable source of funding for public services than the much-hyped \u201cBrexit dividend\u201d<\/a>, given the official forecast is for Brexit to weaken the public finances<\/a> by \u00a315bn a year, rather than grow them, and the \u00a39bn we nominally save<\/a> by leaving was already mostly earmarked for other things. But still, cabinet remainers are obliged to pretend in public that Santa is real, because to do otherwise would embarrass those charlatans who won a referendum partly by pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n So we\u2019re left with the farcical spectacle of fiscally responsible Tories \u2013 the ones who did warn upfront against leaving the EU \u2013 having to go against all their instincts to spare the blushes of the financially reckless, who made promises with money they should have known they wouldn\u2019t have. Boris Johnson<\/a> was apparently absent from Monday\u2019s cabinet, by the way. But you probably guessed that.<\/p>\n To recognise all this is not to be churlish about the promised \u00a320bn itself. It\u2019s not enough (it\u2019s never enough), and it doesn\u2019t help social care or public health, but it\u2019s not nothing, either. It won\u2019t transform the NHS for the better but should stop it getting immeasurably worse; people on waiting lists will be treated a bit faster than they would otherwise have been; they won\u2019t wait on trolleys this winter quite as long as they otherwise might; and some nurses teetering on the brink of resignation after not having had a pay rise since forever might stay. It\u2019s staving off decline rather than solving the problem, but lives will be eased, lengthened or even saved as a result.<\/p>\n The one grimly cheering aspect of the political mess, meanwhile, is that rightwing Tory MPs will have to shut up and play along with the sort of classic tax-and-spend policy they\u2019d once have agreed to only over their dead bodies. It\u2019s that or admit their precious Brexit<\/a> dividend is a mirage, and higher taxes are the only way out of a mess they have themselves created.<\/p>\n But none of that obscures the fact that Theresa May<\/a> can\u2019t say where the NHS money is coming from, still less where she\u2019ll get the money likely to be needed further down the line for other crumbling public services. She can\u2019t say both because she doesn\u2019t yet know (the precise mechanism for raising much of it is reportedly yet to be agreed), and because being explicit about the difficulties would require admitting that the Brexit dividend doesn\u2019t really exist.<\/p>\n This is a truth so unbearable to leavers, who won partly by claiming otherwise, that it can\u2019t be voiced in public. (Or at least, not ahead of this Wednesday\u2019s big Commons vote<\/a>.) So she\u2019s forced to grit her teeth and pretend that yes, this is the windfall Vote Leave promised on their rotten bus \u2013 jolly well done them \u2013 while knowing perfectly well that Brexiters\u2019 chief legacy is to starve the nation of cash just as the taps most need to be turned on after years of austerity.<\/p>\n The Tories have spent decades attacking uncosted spending promises, warning that if opposing parties can\u2019t say where the money\u2019s coming from then either they\u2019re hiding something or you can\u2019t count on it actually happening. Fair enough, but they can hardly claim otherwise now they\u2019re the ones shaking the magic money tree. And thus is everyone in this sorry saga hoist by their own petard \u2013 except, of course, those who got us into this mess in the first place.<\/p>\n