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\u201cI would go mad if this money doesn\u2019t go into the NHS, I will go mad. I want to be assured that this money \u2013 because that\u2019s why I voted to come out\u201d<\/em> \u2013 Shirley in Sunderland (see below). From The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n Measuring Policies in Terms of Hospitals<\/strong><\/p>\n Campaigners and politicians know that if you want to add some emotional oomph to a statistic to support your case, then convert it into something tangible which people care about.\u00a0 In the UK that\u2019s certainly health, and the state of National Health Service is consistently number one public concern.<\/p>\n In the EU Referendum campaign the Leave campaign made effective use of a claim that Brexit would liberate huge sums (\u00a3350m a week) to spend on the NHS.<\/p>\n BBC<\/em><\/p>\n That same statistical translation could now come back to bite them, as Brexiteers grapple with how to communicate the fact that Britain may have to pay \u00a336bn to the EU to meet its liabilities, just in order to get the Brexit negotiations properly underway.<\/p>\n Mail Online 6 August 2017<\/em><\/p>\n Brexiteers obviously see this as a political liability because they immediately started denouncing it as an outrage.\u00a0 \u2018Tory Eurosceptics reject move to pay \u00a336bn EU `divorce\u00b4 bill<\/a>\u2019 ran a Mail Online headline on 6 August.\u00a0 Arch Brexit campaigner, Conservative MP Peter Bone even claimed that the EU should be paying the UK, not the other way around.<\/p>\n So \u00a336bn is a lot but what does it mean in \u2018real terms\u2019 ?\u00a0 In terms of hospitals for instance.\u00a0 BBC journalist Jonathan Dunbar investigated this in a September 2016 post entitled Is a hospital a useful unit of spending?<\/a> \u00a0He wrote:<\/p>\n Politicians and commentators appear to have settled on a new unit of measuring public spending – the hospital. So how much does a hospital actually cost? <\/em><\/p>\n \u2026 The Vote Leave campaign, for instance, declared during the referendum on European Union membership: “The EU costs us \u00a3350 million a week. That’s enough to build a new NHS hospital every week of the year.”<\/em><\/p>\n MEP Daniel Hannan tweeted<\/a>: “According to the European Court of Auditors, \u20ac7 billion of the 2013 budget was misspent. Enough to build 10 state-of-the-art NHS hospitals.”<\/em><\/p>\n The \u00a3350m a week turned out to be a bit of \u2018Fake News\u2019 and was abandoned<\/a> by the Leave campaign after the Referendum but it has stuck in the public mind, so it might be a useful way of breaking down that new number, \u00a336bn.<\/p>\n What About \u00a336bn of Hospitals For The NHS ?<\/strong><\/p>\n As Dunbar points out, the actual cost of a NHS hospital is hard to nail down, as they range from much less to much more than \u00a3350m.\u00a0 One thing that the NHS does buy, and for which the BBC found the figures were in general agreement is MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) \u2018Scanners\u2019.\u00a0 It turns out that these useful diagnostic tools cost the NHS about \u00a3895,000 each.<\/p>\n The cash-strapped NHS could certainly do with a lot more MRI scanners.<\/p>\n Mail Online\/ Daily Mail, June 2014<\/em><\/p>\n In 2014 the Mail Online<\/em>, partner website to the right-wing Daily Mail<\/em>, was outraged to discover from an OECD study<\/a> that even Turkey and Slovakia have more MRI scanners per head than the UK.\u00a0\u00a0 Headlining its report: \u2018Deadly shortage of cancer scanners shames the UK<\/a>\u2019. The Mail<\/em> added:\u00a0 \u2018Nations record on cancer survival is among the worst in Europe\u2019. \u00a0What made this state of affairs even more galling, as the Mail noted glumly, is that the scanner was a British invention (or our scientists were at least \u2018instrumental\u2019 in inventing it).<\/p>\n OECD – the UK has only 7.2 scanners per million people<\/em><\/p>\n OECD – Japan has 51.7 scanners per million people<\/em><\/p>\n UK Could Top The Global Scanner Rankings<\/strong><\/p>\n So for \u00a336bn we could get a lot of MRI scanners.\u00a0 By my calculation the NHS could in fact buy 40,223 MRI scanners. \u00a0Seeing as in 2014 we had only 467<\/a> of them, the UK could increase its scanner quotient 861-fold !\u00a0 With a current UK population of about 65.1m<\/a>, we\u2019d have at least 40,690 MRI scanners, or one scanner per 1600 people.\u00a0 That translates into 625 scanners per one million people, putting Britain where it rightly belongs, at the top of the global scanner table, beating Japan 12 times over.<\/p>\n Or Have 102 New NHS Hospitals<\/strong><\/p>\n On Vote Leave\u2019s figure of \u00a3350m per hospital, we\u2019d get 102 new UK NHS hospitals for \u00a336bn. \u00a0Or rather the NHS isn\u2019t going to get 102 new hospitals, instead the rest of the EU is going to get enough UK taxpayers money to build 102 new NHS hospitals.<\/p>\n Good news that newspapers like the Daily Mail<\/em> could celebrate.\u00a0 Except that there\u2019s a catch: to get at that \u00a336bn for the NHS, we\u2019d have to not leave the EU.\u00a0 The Daily Mail<\/em> of course, is a fervently pro-Brexit newspaper.<\/p>\n Stage 1 of Brexit To Cost the UK 102 Hospitals or 40,690 Scanners<\/strong><\/p>\n To put it in Vote Leave terms, maybe ‘on the side of a bus’, this first stage of Brexit is going to cost the UK over 100 (102 at \u00a3350m each) new NHS hospitals. \u00a0Or if you favour the greater certainty of the BBC\u2019s preferred NHS unit of measurement, it will rob the NHS of over 40,000 MRI scanners and leave us languishing near the bottom of the international cancer- scanner ranking among developed economies.<\/p>\n Makes you think doesn\u2019t it ?<\/p>\n Shirley of Sunderland<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s easy for professional communicators and politicians to regard fast-and-loose use of statistics and framing in a cynical \u2018worldly-wise\u2019 manner, as simply ‘par for the course\u2019.\u00a0 But the tragic thing is that it has had profound real world consequences, and some people were cruelly deceived by the promises of the Leave campaign.<\/p>\n So the other thing it makes me think, is what do all those decent people who voted Leave with the best of intentions because they wanted the NHS to have that \u00a3350m a week, make of the \u00a336bn cost of the first course on the Brexit menu ?\u00a0 People like the lovely Shirley of Sunderland who was interviewed by Sky News<\/em> reporter Faisal Islam<\/a> in August 2016. \u00a0She told him:<\/p>\n \u201cI would go mad if this money doesn\u2019t go into the NHS, I will go mad. I want to be assured that this money \u2013 because that\u2019s why I voted to come out”<\/em><\/p>\n You can watch Faisal Islam\u2019s brilliant report here:<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KG5jvQyF5bA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Vote Leave campaign converted questionable economic statistics into powerful but ultimately false promises about funding the UK NHS in the 2016 EU Referendum campaign.\u00a0 Now, as Britain faces a \u00a336bn bill for the first item on the Brexit menu, … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/BBC-Vote-Leave-Bus-NHS-claim.jpg\")
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