The Tories will protect the NHS budget, David Cameron will announce in his speech to his party conference today. Extracts of the Prime Minister’s speech, which he will deliver in Birmingham later today, include a promise to ‘protect the NHS budget and continue to invest more’.
Cameron will repeat George Osborne’s argument that ‘you can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy’, and will also mention his own personal commitment to the health service, saying:
‘From the country that unravelled DNA, we are now mapping it for each individual. Cracking this code could mean curing rare genetic diseases and saving lives. Our NHS is leading the world on this incredible technology.
‘I understand very personally the difference it could make. When you have a child who’s so ill and the doctors can’t work out what he’s got or why – you’d give anything to know.’
Cameron’s reference to his own personal experience of and commitment to the health service will mean that Labour has to tread carefully when it responds to his speech. It also suggests a personal, moral commitment to the health service.
Even though ring-fencing does make it much more difficult to spread the cuts evenly, this does make political sense as it is an attempt to neuter the Labour claim that the Tories don’t really care about the NHS. Last week Andy Burnham’s speech was one of the few impassioned addresses to the Labour conference, and the Conservatives do know that while Burnham is often quite forgetful about his own role in NHS reform, his attacks do have currency with voters. So neutralising the health service as an election issue is important – and it’s important to get the promise on the ring-fence in sufficiently early that voters recognise it come polling day.
The speech will be part values-based and part policy-based, with the Prime Minister also declaring his ambition to ‘make Britain a country that everyone is proud to call home’.
His task is not just to persuade voters that the Conservatives care about them, but also his party that they have a jolly decent chance of beating Labour and are worth fighting alongside. This is the last Conservative party conference
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