by Jonn Elledge

A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.

Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.

He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.

They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.

The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.

So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.



It had featured in the party’s published health plans since 2007 (page 18, paragraph 3.1.1). A couple of weeks later I interviewed another shadow health minister, Mark Simmonds, who’s a terribly nice chap and who told me the following:

We need an independent body to ensure that the funding follows the requirements and needs of the patient. There’s a significant correlation between age and burden of disease. What the current government have done is to deliberately over emphasise socio-economic deprivation. Of course there are issues in relation to that and prevalence, so it needs to be taken into account, but they’ve done this to transfer resources from rural areas to their urban heartlands.

Brilliant! I thought. Either a) Labour have been inadvertently euthanising elderly Tories; or b) the Tories are openly planning to steal from the poor. Either way, it’s a story.

So I rang a bunch of people who knew more about this than me. I developed a migraine as they tried to explain it to me. And eventually I came to the conclusion that Labour were right, the Tories were wrong, and I wrote this for the New Statesman to argue just that.

Two weeks later, David Cameron announced plans for a “health premium that targets resources on the poorest areas so we banish health inequalities to history.” This, of course, is exactly the kind of measure that Labour had already introduced for “political reasons” and that the Tories’ revisions were intended to correct.

The Conservatives, too, would “deliberately over emphasise socio-economic deprivation”. Cameron added: “If the NHS is not working for the poorest in our society, then it’s doing a poor job.” Those little old ladies can go stuff themselves.

I’d love to think that my ace reporting single-handedly changed Tory policy. (I’d love it even more if you thought the same). But that, sadly, seems vanishingly unlikely.

Instead, I see two possibilities.

Either, the party talked to the same experts I did and realized that their initial policy was bunk. Or, they talked to some focus groups and realized their initial policy was an electoral liability.

I’m not sure which. But what I am sure of is that the Tories have done a bloody great u-turn, and they’re hoping nobody’s noticed.