Rock, Meet Hard Place......

Well, all the party manifestos are out into the public domain, so time will be taken to read them and eventually come up with the party I would most likely vote for.

The first thing that strikes me is that the tax take is due to rise, whichever party you vote for.

Labour: 1p on income tax to piss more money onto the raging money-bonfire that is the NHS.

Tory: When you get old we'll claw back your hard-earned assets bar the last £100,000.

As for fiscal prudence (remember Gordon Brown... anyone?) that's all gone out of the window.

Labour want to nationalise everything so their union chums can hold the country to ransom again, but won't say how they fonud the multi-billillion pound buy-up. Except we all know they will have to borrow sqillions to do it all. Money our Grandchildren will be paying back. The borrowing rates will be interesting given the foundations of sand created by quantative easing (or increasing the money supply as it was called in the 70's). Cue rampant inflation.

The Tories want to be a bit more circumspect. They make noises that they won't piss money away, but in the end over the past 5 years the national debt has gone up despite cuts in spending. The problem being the institutional overspending and inefficiency in government spending. Without correcting the holes, the money bucket will never be full, no matter how much you pour into it.

On education, Labour want to scrap tuition fees. High on my priority list with a daughter in university...

The Tories want to bring back Grammar Schools. Despite failing my 11-plus I do see a place for Grammar Schools and streaming the most able. I've only ever seen Comprehensive schools supporting the least able. I see nothing wrong with skimming off the top 20 or 30% into Grammars, supplying special schools for those less able and having schools catering for the vast majority. We need high flyers and we need schools able to cater for those that can't learn.

So despite being an over-50 adult with a natural proclivity to vote Tory, do I vote Labour? I mean, at least they'll push the debt downstream...

I haven't mentioned the other parties. Liberals, UKIP and Greens. Despite all the airtime they get, they are pretty irrelevant in this election. Sorry UKIP!

The Thatcherite legacy is not only the Tories Fault.

It really annoys me that Labour push themselves as the saviour of the NHS amongst other untruths.
That everything is Maggie's fault. Poor saps, they've never got over that woman and now there's another Tory female PM with a huge popularity rating.

Yes the Tories (but under John Major) introduced targets and with it an overburden of administrators to monitor adherence or not to the targets, but Labour did far more damage.

LABOUR'S Tony Blair was one of the most damaging Prime Ministers when it comes to the NHS. Saddling health trusts with expensive PFI deals that they are paying through the nose for, "reforming" GP contracts that just put up GP's salaries without any increase in cover and also allowing GPs to introduce expensive and impersonal out-of-hours services.

He also introduced no-win-no-fee legal access. In itself a great idea, ordinary people have access to legal redress and not worry about the expense. But the actual legacy is one of Ambulance chasers or Agressive lawyers suing everyone for the slightest thing.

Anna Racoon has started a crusade to enlighten people about the huge burgen that litigation has emburdened the NHS with. Out of a budget of £95Bn, £56Bn will be set aside for litigation. A wholly unsustainable situation where more is spend defending the NHS and settling lawsuits than is actually spent on medicine.

One of the big issues is the payments on these lawsuits is based on the victims of NHS procedures is based on the victim receiving further treatment privately, when the actual truth is they continue to receive treatment from the NHS that caused the issue in the first place.

In effect they bank the money and carry on getting free treatment. There is no mechanism to force people to use the money to get private treatment: the NHS doesn't have a mechanism for excluding people from treatment after suing them. There is also no mechanism to charge the person for treatment by the NHS, thereby getting that money back as the NHS treats them. there's no mechanism to get that money back if the victim dies: it becomes part of their estate. When in truth if they die, treatment ends and the reason for the money being provided ends. There is no clause to repatriate the money back to the NHS on their demise. The money is treated like a windfall for the family.

This dovetails into my previous blogs about the NHS spending millions on expensive cancer drugs, just to extend life expectancy by months, where that money can transform the lives of other patients for decades.

Tere needs to be more oversight of WHERE NHS money is being spent and most certainly SHOVELLING MORE MONEY AT THE NHS IS NOT THE SOLUTION.

Targets are not the solution. More targets means employing more staff to measure them: staff that are not employed in the business of care.

There needs to be an intelligent debate about the NHS budget, whether where it is going is delivering the best care for the country.

The media will dumb it down into a Labour/Tory public/private debate, when it really needs to be a more adult and detailed affair. As the people paying the bills, at the end of the day the media owe us a more accourate account of what is going on.