by Asa Bennett

This morning David Cameron sought to reclaim the initiative on the NHS after last week’s partisan debate that has raged between Labour and the Conservatives, and also to draw a line under the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan’s controversial attack on the NHS on Fox News.

Delivering a speech in Bolton, Cameron made the expected reaffirmation that the Conservatives were the “party of the NHS”, and accused Labour of indulging in “political point-scoring” rather than addressing the issues facing the NHS. While Labour’s tendency to seek political advantage with the NHS has already been discussed, Cameron has had to recover after Labour’s genuine, albeit minor, tactical win with their use of the Twitter #ilovethenhs campaign.

The Tory Leader, as per his conciliatory style, acknowledged Labour’s successes and pledged that they will “go further and faster”. However, Cameron made a potentially risky move with his speech as while he reiterated his desire to reform the NHS, he declared that NHS spending would rise in line with inflation from 2011-14 under a Tory government. This NHS spending bravado is a political time-bomb for the Tories since in the current economic climate, they have to take great care over which departments’ spending would avoid spending cuts, let alone which departments would be given budget increases and by dedicating themselves to such a financial commitment, they will either have to renege on this in some way or, to maintain their pledge, end up crippling their budget in other key areas.

As the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Philip Hammond, said when attacking Labour’s budget:

“if you ringfence health and guarantee increases in public health spending, you will inevitably see 10 per cent cuts in spending in other departments”

Hopefully the Conservatives will place greater emphasis on the reforming and streamlining of the NHS. The Conservatives have been influenced and pushed to protect the NHS so zealously due to the service being an emotive issue (consider many of the #ilovethenhs tweets being about how the NHS helped the tweeter and that the Government has had to conceal NHS spending cuts ). The Conservatives are making a heavy financial pledge without knowing how maintainable it will be, this is a bizarre decision since in March the Conservatives ruled out publishing a Shadow Budget plan because “We can’t honestly know how bad things will be until we get in and look at the books”.

Consequently the Conservatives seem to be falling short in their pledge to be a “government of thrift” and to provide prudent financial stewardship, which is what Britain most needs to escape the recession and the vast amounts of debt that Cameron himself has acknowledged.

Do you agree?