ONE thing is for certain today: by the end of it, most of us will be paying more of our wages in income tax. In Gordon Brown we have one of the most enthusiastic raisers of taxes in modern history.

True, he has not put up the standard rate since he came into office, but he has put up just about every other rate you can think of, and he has taxed us by stealth with his "reform" of pension funds.

The Government has been softening us up for months for today's coming tax rise. The public has been canvassed through opinion polls, which claim that most of us are willing to pay more tax if this will give us a better National Health Service.

Well, yes. But if more funding today will supposedly deliver a better health service, why didn't all the extra funding in the past give us a better health service? Under New Labour, billions have been poured into the NHS yet it remains inefficient and filthy, disorganised and over-managed.

Meanwhile, the Government offers statistics which it claims show that the NHS is getting better. For example, it says that, last year, there were fewer patients waiting for operations. Not true. There were fewer people waiting for longer than twelve months, but more waiting up to twelve months. Presented with the true figures by the independent monitoring group Reform, the Government has been forced to admit that the number of patients treated last year rose by one per cent, while health spending rose by seven per cent.

Beware! Government statistics can seriously damage your health. Example: non-urgent medical cases are being attended to ahead of serious cases. This has the result of artificially reducing waiting lists, while leaving seriously-ill patients untreated for longer. Another sleight of hand is the trick of not putting so many people on the list in the first place.

It beats me why so many people give in to the Government's moral blackmail and agree to still higher taxes for the NHS. Ever-increasing taxation has been shown not to work. If you keep chucking money down a hole in the ground, you don't mend the hole - but you do waste your money. Where does all our money go? It goes mainly on administration: 15 years ago, there were 500 senior managers in the NHS, whereas now, there are 70,000. The Government then thinks that, to make the bureaucracy efficient, it needs to spend more money on it. But this doesn't make it more efficient, only more bureaucratic.

In fairness to the Government, we should admit that a big cause of the vast growth in health spending is our greatly increased expectation: we consult the doctor or seek a hospital appointment where our grandparents would have taken homespun remedies and waited for the illness to clear up.

But one fact shines as brightly as the lights in the operating theatre. Most developed nations have a better health service than ours - but theirs are funded through a combination of public and private money, while ours is still hidebound by socialist ideology and consequently it is as ill-governed as the nationalised industries in the Soviet Union.

Published: 16/04/2002