In other news… the NHS, human rights and levels of spending

Liberal Democrats seek changes to health reform – The Observer on the aftermath of the party’s spring conference vote on the NHS.

“Nick Clegg has just won a powerful victory over the Conservatives, appointing a Bill of Rights commission which is certain to leave the ECHR intact” – The Spectator.

And in The Independent, Dominic Lawson is unimpressed with some of the comments made about public spending:

As Dr Tim Morgan points out in his incisive Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Five Fiscal Fallacies, “No one should imagine that the Coalition’s plans amount to a major reversal of past spending increases. By 2015-16, and expressed at 2009-2010 values, public spending (of £647bn) will remain higher than in 2008-2009 (£640 bn), let alone 1999-2000 (£438bn). In turning the spending clock back to 2008-2009, government will be reducing real-terms expenditure by £22bn, a small fraction of the previous escalation.” This should be borne in mind when the public sector trade union leaders talk of a “massacre” of public services and of the “abolition” of the welfare state – and also when the bloated panjandrums of the defence establishment use similarly apocalyptic terms: on the Treasury’s own figures, welfare spending will be 34 per cent higher, in real terms, in 2014-15 than it was in 1999-2000, and defence spending will be 36 per cent higher.