The Guardian view on the NHS cash plan: the Brexit dividend claim is a lie | Editorial
When she was interviewed on Sunday's BBC One Andrew Marr programme, Theresa May knowingly and dishonestly suggested that leaving the European Union was the central dynamic behind her new NHS spending pledges. Having started by saying she was determined to secure the NHS's future, she immediately invoked the shoddy Brexit campaign bus slogan of 2016 with implied approval. Then she talked about the money Britain would save by leaving the EU; finally she deliberately spoke in ways that would lead any unwary listener to assume that a so-called "Brexit dividend" was the windfall that enabled her to make the new spending pledge. Characteristically, Boris Johnson was even more mendacious, calling the pledge "a down payment on the cash we will soon get back from our EU payments".
All of this was a lie. It disgraces Mrs May to tell such a whopper. True, by the time that she gave her speech on NHS spending on Monday, her words were rather more circumspect; the essential deception nevertheless endured. "Some of the extra funding" will come from money that now goes to the EU, she said at London's Royal Free Hospital, "but the commitment I am making goes beyond that Brexit dividend." That is true with bells on, since the NHS pledge dwarfs any future savings on the UK's Brexit payments.
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