Darzi's Big Lotto Giveaway

The NHS will have to make "efficiency savings" of over two thousand million pounds this year, and will probably have its budget frozen before being finally and irrevocably privatised by Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives a year or two from now. What better time, then, for Lord Polyclinic to take twenty million from the depleted funds and promise to dole it out in "financial incentives" for any health worker who can come up with an idea for slashing the budgets further? "We want everyone to be thinking about innovation," said Lord Polyclinic, "because that is what will drive improvement", rather than anything silly like a rational allocation of resources. The Government claims (or "believes", as the Observer's Whitehall telepath hath it) that "healthcare standards can continue to improve in a recession only if the 1.3 million NHS staff think constantly about 'innovation'". The innovation in question must, of course, be innovation of the proper sort; namely the kind from which Britain's infrastructure, education, transport, building and energy industries have benefited for the past thirty years. It must not be the kind of backward-looking, stick-in-the-mud, Britishness-deficient innovation which could lead to the cancellation of the ID card scheme, the NHS database, the Afghan Crusade, the London Olympics or the Private Finance Initiative. It must be the sort of innovation which will enable the Government, at no extra expense, to police, poke, micromanage and bully such work-shy criminal underclasses as fat children, old people and those with long-term illnesses. According to Lord Polyclinic, "it is a case of changing the mindset" of those who still fail to see the issue of public health as a matter of simple profiteering: "the [financial] benefits for UK plc will be hundreds of percentages above the value of prizes".