Guardian News and Media/London
Voting ‘No’ to independence is critical to the future of the health service in Scotland, Alistair Darling has said in a direct challenge to one of the ‘Yes’ campaign’s most successful arguments with voters.
The leader of the pro-union Better Together campaign said new powers for the Scottish parliament, which would be set in train the day after a No vote, would result in a stronger, more secure health service.
Those powers would enable Holyrood to raise extra money to spend on the NHS as well as borrow more to build hospitals and facilities for the elderly.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Darling attacked what has been one of the main planks of the pro-independence campaign in recent weeks, that a Yes vote is the only way to the protect the NHS in Scotland from Westminster’s cuts and privatisation.
Referring to confidential papers passed to the BBC which suggest the NHS in Scotland is facing a funding gap of more than £400mn and that sweeping cuts will be needed for health boards to break even, Darling said: “Today we learned that (Scottish National party leader and deputy) Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have been deceiving us. I find that quite appalling.
“After all these scare stories (about privatisation) they’ve known that these cuts are coming along but we weren’t going to be told about it until after the polls had closed,” he told the Good Morning Scotland show.
The papers were passed to the BBC by a senior NHS whistleblower, who said they had become frustrated by claims from the Yes campaign that the greatest threat to the NHS came from the UK government.
Darling was speaking after the leaders of the UK’s three main political parties signed a pledge to give more powers to Scotland if it rejects independence.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, his deputy, Nick Clegg, and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, signed a letter, which appeared on the front page of yesterday’s Daily Record newspaper, promising extensive new powers for the Scottish parliament and, crucially, guaranteeing the continuation of the Barnett funding formula.
Asked if it was possible to trust the pledge when Westminster priorities could change after the next general election, and in particular if Clegg could be believed after his U-turn on his university tuition-fees pledge, Darling said the same arguments were made in 1997 around the formation of the Scottish parliament and had proved to be without foundation.
Speaking on the same programme, Salmond, the first minister of Scotland, said it was “absolutely untrue” that there would be cuts to the NHS budget in Scotland, describing Darling’s argument as “totally mythical, totally made up and meant to misrepresent the situation”.
