[origin_path]

That's what lots of people want - I can assure you, I know quite a few - but the British left attacks anyone so viciously and nastily that they aren't ever going to admit it to anyone seen in the vicinity of a Guardian.

The NHS has collapsed since COVID. No, it isn't due to lack of funding, that's a lie. NHS funding has increased massively under the Conservatives who haven't talked about even limited privatisation for the last decade or more. The reason it collapsed is that rigid commands and control systems cannot cope with change and the NHS was already dysfunctional before that. When they emptied the hospitals they created a massive backlog that they already knew they could never catch up on even with more funding.

At any rate it's irrelevant. The excess deaths are much more likely to be vaccine linked despite the collapsed state of the NHS. The timing, causes of death and split between vaxxed and unvaxxed doesn't really work for the theory it's lockdown caused.

[cirrus-clouds]

NHS funding has increased massively under the Conservatives

That is simply not true. The Conservatives came to power in 2010. Here's what the The King's Fund [1] has to say on funding:

"In the decade following the global financial crisis in 2008, the health service faced the most prolonged spending squeeze in its history: between 2009/10 and 2018/19 health spending increased by an average of just 1.5% per year in real terms, compared to a long-term average increase of 3.6 per cent per year. These pressures were not unique to the UK, whose public spending on health care as a share of GDP is above the EU average, though lower than several comparable nations, including Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands." (Source: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/positions/nhs-funding)

[1] The The King's Fund is an independent charitable organisation working to improve health and care in England.

[MagnumOpus]

To put that 1.5% annual real-terms budget increase into context:

In the same decade the proportion of people aged 65+ increased from 16% to 22%ish of the population, an increase of a third. Since these are the people who consume the vast majority of NHS resource, the actual age-adjusted funding has been shrinking steadily every year.

[origin_path]

But we're not talking about whether budgets increased by as much as random HN commenters feel would be ideal, I said funding had increased massively i.e. in absolute terms, which it has.

Any discussion of the NHS budget has to accept this reality - the British state is already deep in deficit for decades and had built up incredible debts just trying to keep the NHS budget rising, which it always has. To say the NHS would works better with more money is simply to admit it's broken and can't be fixed, because the government can't even afford the current levels. Especially not after the attempts to stop COVID blew debt and inflation through the roof.

[Dagger2]

We were talking about the NHS being underfunded, and you said that funding has increased in absolute terms. Both of these things can be true simultaneously.

[origin_path]

But, we were not. This thread starts with the claim that "NHS funding has massively increased under the Conservatives" (true) and someone else saying "that's simply not true". But it is true.

NHS apologists always seem to try this switcheroo: someone will point out NHS funding has massively increased - an objectively true claim - and then they'll be accused of lying, by someone who claims it's "underfunded", an entirely subjective and different claim. As you point out, both can be true, but the latter is not disproof of the former nor even a well defined statement.

[Dagger2]

Looking up in the thread, I see "Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade" in the first post and things like "No, it isn't due to lack of funding, that's a lie" in the replies.

That definitely sounds like the thread was talking about underfunding/lack of funding to me.

Also, for what it's worth, I think your use of "massively" carries an implication to the reader that funding has increased above and beyond maintenance levels (i.e. that it's gone up in real terms, compared to inflation and demographic changes), as I think most people wouldn't describe increases that are below the level needed to maintain service relative to costs as being "massive increases". You'd probably get less pushback if you described it as "increased in absolute terms", or specifically pointed out that the funding increases have been lower than the underlying cost increases.

I know you did eventually add the "in absolute terms" part, but perhaps consider starting with that next time.

[origin_path]

You realise that this quote supports what I just said, right? It takes massive funding increases to consistently increase budgets year over year for over a decade by that much after inflation adjustment given how huge the NHS budget already is. Go on, compare the budgets between those periods in actual pound sterling terms and then think about how much more tax had to be raised to sustain that (or rather how much debt had to be issued).

[benj111]

Waiting lists are going down. They just cleared the backlog of people waiting 3 years for treatment

[MagnumOpus]

Sure, and the excess deaths above help a lot in doing that.

Still, while waiting for patients to die is an cheap way to shorten backlogs, it does leave not instill confidence…

[benj111]

Except people don't tend to die from needing a hip replacement or other quality of life surgeries. The urgent things tend to get done first.

[origin_path]

They die of old age instead? Not really better. The point of the NHS is to treat people, if you have to wait three years for treatment that's the same thing as collapse, it's not really different from the user's perspective.

[benj111]

Are you suggesting the 3 year backlog has been cleared in 6 months just from people dying of old age?

I agree a 3 year wait is unacceptable, but 2 years of that was covid. Covid has largely passed so they are now getting through the backlog.

[phtrivier]

I'm genuinely interested in the link to the data about the vaxx / unvaxxed split.

I know the most ardent antivaxxers are going to explain every death in the next 30 years by the vaxx ; but the numbers would be so staggering that I suspect plain old counting would help.

[origin_path]

Traveling today so don't have easy access to my bookmarks with that data (is heavily buried in UK govt websites) but here's an analysis of the excess death data that also shows ambulance call outs jump permanently and significantly in April 2021

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/massive-increases-in-exc...

A lot of it is due cardiac reasons. You can also look at when excess death went up in younger age ranges that weren't affected by COVID and see that it starts at the same time the vaccine programme reached them. Hard to explain as lockdowns given they'd been happening for a year by that time.

Edit: Here we go. here's an analysis of deaths by vaccine status for the UK:

https://bartram.substack.com/p/deaths-by-vaccination-status-...

N.b. The way you calculate the population size heavily affects the meaning of this data and the government itself doesn't know what the population is, so there's plenty to debate here, but you can see why the author concludes there should be an investigation. He uses a conservative pop estimate based on official NHS registrations (because the ons estimate is definitely wrong) and plots the graph of the difference by status at the end. So you can set that for everyone under 75 the vaccines appear to be making things worse not better.

[cies]

> I know the most ardent antivaxxers are going to explain every death in the next 30 years by the vaxx

In same vein the "every death" (or hospitalization) during the covid pandemic was due to covid and/or lack of vaccination.

I add quotation marks because in both cases I do not believe it's true.