After today's revelation, we can't deny it any longer: the price of Brexit will be the NHS

Far from an extra £350m a week, what the UK actually faces is a choice between the Brexit that Gove, Johnson and co want, or a fully funded NHS that works. Just for fun, ask yourself how another poll couched in those terms might go

Never forget (Getty)

Anyone wanting a dagger to plunge into the Government’s Brexit policy can find a freshly sharpened one courtesy of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation.

“What on earth are you on about?” I hear you say. They’re nonpartisan, and the coldly analytical look at the NHS’s finances they have released today has nothing to do with the Conservative Party’s attempt to commit hari-kari on behalf of everyone living on these islands.

Let me explain: You will be aware that the big lie of the EU referendum was the claim that Brexit could release £350m a week extra for the NHS, regularly touted by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and the rest of their cabal of porky-pie salesmen.

The Government’s own Office for National Statistics blew it out of the water, but it got a lot of attention and swayed a lot of people.

Why? The NHS is popular, and it should be, not just because” free at the point of need” is a beautiful thing, something worth fighting for notwithstanding any financial considerations. It is actually a relatively efficient provider of mass healthcare that compares favourably to alternatives, particularly the American system that some of the nuttier Tory ideologues still dream of.

Pledges of extra money for it are apt to find favour with an electorate that the report notes shows evidence of being willing to pay even if that means extra taxes. No wonder the Leave campaign was able to make such headway with its erroneous assertion.

Now let’s return to what the IFS, which deals with reality as opposed to political claims, has had to say about its future.

Its report looks at what has actually been pledged to date for the NHS against what is actually needed to maintain the level of service at where it is now, and what would be needed to improve it.

In doing so, it considers the needs of a population that, as I noted in a column a couple of weeks ago, is rapidly ageing.

The Health Foundation’s “modernised NHS” scenario allowing for “modest” improvements in services would, says the IFS, cost an estimated 2.6 per cent of GDP by 2033–34, amounting to £56bn in today’s money, or £2,000 per year for each household in the UK.

“These figures are substantially larger than recent political pledges to the NHS,” the report notes.

The Health Foundation’s less generous “status quo” scenario would still require an additional 1.6 per cent of GDP by 2033–34. Of that, 0.9 per cent of GDP of would be required by 2023−24. That is equivalent to £20bn, or £700 per year per household in the UK, in today’s money.

This analysis makes both the Tories’ talk of tax cuts that I highlighted in my previous column, but also some of Labour’s spending promises, look highly cynical if not actively mendacious.

But wait a minute – doesn’t that £20bn figure look familiar?

It’s here that we come right back to Brexit. The chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs told MPs that firms would have to pay £32.50 for each customs declaration under the so-called “max fac” solution favoured by leading Tory Brexiteers. It adds up to a total of – cha-ching – £20bn a year out of the economy, substantially more than the UK’s £13bn contribution to the EU in 2016, much of which, as the ONS noted, comes back.

And all it does is cover the cost of the Brexiteers’ favoured customs system. There are a whole host of other costs on top of that, some of which are only starting to make themselves felt.

The Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, for example, this week stated that the UK has already paid twice that £20bn through lower economic growth as a result of the Brexit vote.

Then there is the £39bn EU divorce bill that the UK is bound to pay.

Just writing those numbers gives me a headache. They underline the madness the government is engaged in. Historians looking back on this period could be forgiven for simply saying, “WTF?”

It is clear that plugging the hole in the NHS’s finances would be challenging even were the UK planning to remain in the EU, or had the May government opted to pursue a less destructive Norway-type Brexit scenario that kept the UK in the European Economic Area and customs union, something many hardcore Brexiteers claimed would be the most likely outcome.

But it would be a whole lot easier to meet that challenge than it will in the situation we currently face, as the figures clearly demonstrate.

Far from an extra £350m a week, what the UK actually faces is a choice between the Brexit that Gove, Johnson and co want, or a fully funded NHS that works.

Just for fun, ask yourself how another poll couched in those terms might go. The Brexiteers know the answer, which is why they’ll fight tooth and nail to stop the people from getting such a vote.