Boris is already demonstrating how his government will be all tell and no show

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister - a phrase that used to sound like a joke - made a lot of promises in his first speech from Downing Street. His announcement of £1.8bn has been reported as the first down payment on these pledges.

Here-in lies a key sample of what we can expect from Boris Johnson and his verbose new government. A big promise and an announcement, with all the PR trimmings to follow, which on inspection fails to live up to the terms.

All tell and no show. The Boris way.

It's also been the Tories way through all of their time in government, whether under Cameron or May. Announcing old funding again as new funding, relabelling and reannouncing, fiscal politics played out in the media rather than in the treasury. And all the while, the cuts go on.

In the present case, Boris has offered up a lump of extra cash for the NHS. But it isn't what it seems. In fact, the £1bn 'upfront' is money that the government had already promised to the NHS - in exchange for three years of trusts slashing their budgets - only to then block hospitals from spending it.

The second half is for what is know as capital spending, long term investment to pay now for projects that will be ready years from now. This kind of spending is deeply important, but does little for struggling hospitals in the present - and even that sum isn't coming right away.

What the government cares about are the flurry of headlines that follow these press releases - often printed wholly and uncritically in the media. While the front pages tell people what the Tories want them to hear, the analysis is buried and with it the debunking of the government's claims.

These headlines are the heart of a long term government strategy, all about governing by telling and not showing. It has allowed them to slash and slash again at budgets, and the services they fund, and to deflect criticism on to others - mostly the vulnerable, exposed by the Tories' own austerity politics.

Don't be fooled by the headlines. Don't let the Tories, as John Harris puts it, sow "discord and resentment via austerity" only to reap the rewards of the chaos with a sharp PR strategy. If we're not sharper ourselves, we'll face the consequences of Tory disaster politics while they profit.

Ideology, NHS funding and money from nothing: Beware politicians bearing gifts

Under Theresa May and Philip Hammond, the Conservative government has continued on from where it left off under David Cameron and George Osborne. Austerity at the top of the agenda, with all else battered before it's ideological wake.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that the Prime Minister at the head of the party of austerity, this weekend, made a pledge to increase NHS funding by £20 billion a year.

How does this happen?

The Conservatives, for sure, in the majority these days ascribe to a "pro-business" ideology. A belief in private sector growth that boosts tax returns, that in turn cuts taxes, that in turn boosts private sector growth.

That is the ideological belief, at least. One that requires the market to play along with the ideal - particularly when the private sector is required to pick up the slack as the public sector is cut back by the government.

However, these ideological ideas must interact with the real world - and with one of the prime movers of compromise in the political sphere: the point at which politics as ideology meets politics as a competition with a lot riding on it.

The Conservatives in government and Labour on the opposition benches have differing ideologies - though the gaps between the two are at times and in places very narrow, and produce primary outcomes that are very similar.

That similarity comes from politics as a high stakes competition. Each party vying to shape public opinion, or to win over the electorate as public opinion stands - shaping what is called the 'centre ground'.

So even as the Tory government cuts with one hand, it looks to deliver a windfall with the other, to shore up electoral support. And, in this case, that means doing precisely that which the party accuses Labour - making large spending commitments, reckless in the absence of a clearly defined statement as to where the money will come from.

But ideology is never far away. Theresa May followed up her offer of new funding with a cautionary word that the health service much watch and account for every penny carefully. And others have pointed out that this injection of cash only brings the NHS back up to level of funding it had between 1948 and 2010 - when the Tories began imposing austerity.

So long as we treat politics like a game of win or lose in the pursuit of power, we can expect belief to be mingled with ambitious pragmatism. And we must remain wary that what we're being sold comes through layers of motivations - especially when it's a windfall of cash with no obvious source.

Budget 2017: Cautious Hammond has salves not solutions, as Budget falls short of action

Chancellor Philip Hammond was in bombastic mood for delivering his second Budget of 2017, making jokes despite the Office of Budget Responsibility's projections that listed productivity as down and growth falling. He brushed past those figures with lots of Brexiter-placating language and an opening salvo of £3bn put aside to get the country Brexit ready.

In the build-up to the Budget, Sarah Ann Harris in The Huffington Post UK posted an article listing those measures that charities said would be needed to address Britain's varied crises. Together, they would have required at least £10bn of new funding.

In the Budget, Hammond acknowledged the pressures and hardships and said that he was prepared to invest. But when the announcements came, they ultimately offered no more than half of the requested amounts to alleivate hardships.

On the disastrous impact of Universal Credit, Hammond went halfway towards the requests, even of MPs on his own benches, of reducing restraints on claimants - taking one week rather than two out of the waiting time to receive funds. With other easing measures, Hammond called this a £1.5bn package of support. Yet this was step didn't even reach the minimum requests for alleviation.

On the NHS, the Chancellor offered up some large numbers. These break down to smaller numbers, though. The figure of £10bn, for capital spending - infrastructure, buildings, etc - is spread across the five years of the Parliament, meaning no more than £2mn-£3mn a year. Another £2.8bn will be spread over three years, with just £350mn front-loaded to avert crisis this winter.

There was an olive branch to nurses in the form of a commitment to fund a pay rise for nurse, but this was conditional on negotiating a new contract settlement with the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

To address the housing crisis, and in particular affordability, the Chancellor announced a £44bn fund. This was, however, then broken down. This fund would be only partly public funding, with the other parts being loans and guarantees, and was intended to run through to the middle of the 2020s.

That could stretch that £44bn over eight years, or even more, meaning the yearly amount would actually be much lower, at around £5bn-£6bn - of which only a part would be a public funding rise.

At most this overall package, to tackle a range of social crises in Britain, will come to £2.4mn/year, plus only a part of the around £6bn/year package being invested in the housing market. That looks like being a long way short of the £10bn minimum requested.

The Chancellor found some money to invest, with £500m for various areas of tech, a few billion more to extend the Nation Productivity Fund, and a new £2.5bn fund to support new innovative, knowledge intensive, companies. Another £1.7bn was found for cities and city regions for various local infrastructure projects. The reality though, is that most of that will be spread over several years.

The Conservative Chancellor framed this as rejecting extra borrowing and instead using some of the headroom within his fiscal rules. However, there are still questions over how the Chancellor is going to fund these and the reality is there will still be lots more borrowing, with the process of eliminating the  debt and deficit extended over a longer period.

The headline offer made by Hammond was to end Stamp Duty for first time home buyers on homes up to £300,000. While this was trailed as a boon to young people, the reality is that it will serve current homeowners best - likely helping and subsidising current people who are, on the face of it, more likely to already be Tory voters.

The cautious Chancellor had hedged his bets with this Budget. He has tried to appeal to all sides, to make everyone feel like they came out of this Budget with a little something. The reality is that no one has gotten what they wanted, although Brexiters may have been midly appeased by £3bn and adopting their rhetoric.

Social pressures in Britain demand a response, but the Chancellor has decided not to act. Hammond has stuck with cheap salves rather than paying for the solutions. To make real progress, we need more from the Exchequer.

The questions the Prime Minister doesn't answer are usually the important ones, like Layla Moran's question on free childcare

Photograph: Child Care by Lubomirkin on Unsplash (License) (Cropped)

On Wednesday, new Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran attempted to ask a question at PMQs. Her effort was drowned out - and ultimately upstaged by - the Tories' reaction. The bad behaviour of MPs got the headlines and successfully buried the lead.

Getting the media to write headlines about bad behaviour - the proverbial dead cat on the table - rather than the substance of policy is the basic aim of cynical political strategy. For the Conservatives, that's a point scored.

Moran was finally able to ask her question, though, and called on the PM to take action on the problems that have arisen with the Government's longstanding pledge to expand free childcare to thirty hours a week for 3 and 4 year olds.

The Prime Minister's response was less than convincing and that shouldn't be a surprise. The problems encountered in delivering this flagship policy underline the fundamental failings of the May Government and it's predecessor.

The plan to expand free childcare, a major campaign promise, has run into major problems. The moderated version of these events are that some thousands of families can't access the service thanks to 'technical issues'.

However, Layla Moran turned a light on the deeper problems underlying the implementation: the Tory claim that they were offering so called 'free' childcare masks the fact that they're not paying the full cost of the childcare.

This is a persistent habit of the Tories. They make big pledges, but then shift responsibility for delivery, and for raising funding, to others. Local government has also been hurt by this Conservative approach.

The Tories hand off ever further responsibility from central government, while drastically reducing funding as they devolve control over it. Social care in particular has been badly hit, even as the costs in the sector continually rise.

It's worth noting it was Theresa May's attempt to respond to that self-created social care crisis that hurt the Tories so badly at the election. The party's new plans for social care - to raid middle class homeowners - didn't survive beyond the manifesto launch.

In the case of childcare, it means that many providers won't offer the service as it is simply not finacially viable to do so. That will restrict access to free care. For others, it will mean increased costs as providers are forced to spread the costs across other service users.

This is a trend with the Conservatives, one that has plagued the policies enacted by the government. Privatised delivery has produced poor results and ethical violations in the provision of welfare. Local government has had funding taken away and then been called out for not keeping front line services, such as libraries, open.

Outcomes can be explained away. They can be put down to ideological differences as to the end goals, or dismissed with excuses blaming past governments or other bodies. But the failure of flagship policies shouldn't be shrugged off.

The expansion of free childcare is a long standing promise, but one that has had a cloud over it for most of that time. Failure to provide the plans with adequate funding was pointed out as far back as the end of 2016.

Problems have been noted and gone unaddressed, undermining the fundamental promise contained in the pledged policy. Failures like this need to be catalogued, because it keeps happening under these Conservative governments.

Shifting responsibility to others, denying funding. At some point, the buck has to stop and the Conservatives have to be held to account for their policies and their failure in the delivery of them.

General Election 2017 - Plaid Cymru and Wales: Poor, fractured and ignored, Wales needs a new and radical alternative

Plaid Cymru want to pick up the baton from Labour, but Wales needs a much more radical revival.

Wales is poor, fractured and ignored. To get to the bottom of the needs of the country, it's necessary to start by accepting that. The next step is to accept that very little has been done to address the first step.

The fault for that doesn't fall only on Labour. Since the party spent thirteen years in government at Westminster, and in office as the government of Wales for the last eighteen, it is unsurprising that Tories see Wales as Labour's weak(est) spot.

But the Conservatives have little to offer now and have done little for Wales in the past - other than shut down the last primary industry upon which the country had depended, when they closed the coal mines.

Through three eras of Westminster centralisation - one Labour, two Conservative - Wales has been left with an economy painfully dependent upon public sector employment and its remaining industries are in a perilous state.

Steel in South Wales is struggling to stay afloat against the sudden flood caused by China's mass dumping of its huge stocks of steel onto markets. The scrambling efforts of Conservative ministers and Labour MPs to find a way to secure jobs bought time for Welsh steel.

This desperate scramble shouldn't be necessary. But so little attention has been paid to Wales that it has fallen into dependence: on a narrow few industries, on public funding, on EU funding - it was in fact among the larger recipients of Europe's Regional Development Funds.

Yet even these few things are at risk. The established parties just keep papering over the cracks. The reality is that Wales needs a new party.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru would very much like voters to see them as just that. But the trouble is, that they're not.

At the core of their manifesto is a commitment to protecting funding and increasing investment, to be issued from Cardiff rather than Westminster, within the context of defending Welsh sovereignty. It's a vaguely nationalist, but otherwise ordinary, pitch for twentieth century social democracy.

Now. Properly implemented, there is plenty that social democrats could achieve for Wales. From fresh funding, to supporting new industries, these are essential projects that only the public body capable of providing.

Investment in infrastructure, in rail and road, in telecomms and broadband, and in new homes; supporting small businesses with public contracts, reformed business rates and a Welsh Development Bank; caring for people with more compassionate welfare and better funded healthcare.

These policies are all progressive priorities and all necessary to boosting Britain's economy out of its doldrums. But they're all just focused on making the best of the status quo - even with a little more devolution.

The problem for Plaid Cymru are that they're caught between fighting their long battle to pull Wales out of Labour's grip and fending off Tory efforts to to take advantage of Labour's, seemingly, ebbing strength.

The party are also affected by being close enough to power in Wales to play it safe. Its an outcome for the party's internal historical struggle, between nationalism and conservatism on the one hand, and a Left-wing community socialism upon the other.

The outcome of the struggle was a Centre/Centre-Left party of social democrats, comfortable with public intervention - much the same as Labour, just with its policies filtered through the lens of national identity.

The party matches the progressive parties at Westminster in their commitments. But where is the rebirth that Wales sorely needs?

Rebalancing Wales

Wales is a country whose political bonds are breaking It is split geographically and economically between South and North, between just two concentrations of people with a dearth of infrastructure and wealth lying between them.

In important ways, the situation of Wales reflect that of Western Europe, Europe and the West as a whole - rural versus urban, towns versus cities, richer versus poorer, migration & concentration, the centres becoming intolerable and the fringes being abandoned.

Politics in Wales hasn't helped. How deeply Labour has embedded itself in communities is a huge impediment to progress. At the local elections, there were many independents that made life difficult for Corbyn's Labour. But beneath that simpler narrative was a more complicated one, of Labour versus unofficial Labour.

That situation is a problem, because Wales right now needs less Westminster and more grassroots. It needs an Ada Colau more than it needs a Jeremy Corbyn.

Plaid Cymru should be better positioned that any other party in Wales to offer some truly radical alternatives. Among the party's founders was DJ Davies, also a founding member of Welsh Labour, an industrialist and economist who believed in the economics of co-operation and putting control in the hands of workers.

In their current manifesto, the part that comes closest to a project for rebirth is "Putting energy into our environment". Their plans, to support a national electric car infrastructure, green energy tidal lagoons and decentralised public energy, strike a theme of industry reborn under community ownership that thrusts towards the heart of what Wales needs. But it gets too little focus.

A New Mentality

Wales needs a new mentality, based on a radical devolution to the local level - to reengage people with the power and funds to rebuild their communities. But it can't be just urban municipalism.

It needs a movement that can give towns, both urban and rural, back into the hands of their communities and reinvigorate civic life - a locally focused, municipal-agrarian movement that can be brave and rethink how we approach rural life and make it sustainable in the future.

A movement that is prepared to imagine new ways to build the bonds between communities. That builds a sense of common identity by building the bonds between communities, that builds a sense of country by building a country.

Wales needs a brave new vision. A revival. Yet nobody is truly offering one. As it stands, fresh polls suggest Corbyn's Labour may make it through it's dark Welsh night. It doesn't deserve to, but New Labour's cynical adage remains true: there still isn't really an alternative.

The Budget: Hammond's budget all about tweaks - spending headlines mostly in the millions rather than the billions

Philip Hammond delivered his first budget today. Photograph: NATO Summit Wales 2014 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (License) (Cropped)

Philip Hammond looked relaxed, even made jokes, as he delivered his first - and apparently Britain's last - Spring Budget. The Chancellor's budget was one tweaks, all framed as adjustments to increase fairness. He began by summarising current economic trends, noting the highest number of women in employment ever. Growth projections are up slightly, but a projected drop in borrowing is only short term.

The long term economic plan of his predecessor George Osborne, to eliminate the deficit and produce a surplus to whittle away the national debt, was much delayed. Its aims where pushed back again by Hammond today. The promised fiscal surplus now not likely be seen until a long way into the 2020s - at least.

As for spending, the numbers he was pitching were all notably in the millions rather than the billions. £200 million for school repairs. £100 million for A&Es. A few hundred million for devolved administrations. £700m for councils to tackle urban congestion. The one exception appeared to £2 billion for Social Care - yet that was immediately qualified as being spread over three years.

Those spending commitments were companied by big companies seeing Corporation Tax fall again, as planned, to 17%. Perhaps as a counter to the criticism Conservatives have faced for their tax cuts for those at the top end, Hammond did however announce a halving of Director-shareholders' tax-free dividend allowance - noting it as a very generous tax break for investors.

For income taxes and wages that affect the overwhelming majority of people, the Personal Income Tax Allowance and the National Living Wage will both increase, to £11,500 and £7.50 respectively. The Universal Credit taper rate will also be reduced from 65% to 63% for earnings over allowances. Yet the overall positive impact of these is likely to be slim.

It is not surprising then that Jeremy Corbyn attacked the Chancellor's budget as one of "utter complacency". Corbyn painted a picture of people in precarious work - unsure of where they'll find work or what money they may make tomorrow, queueing at food banks and one of a million working households getting housing benefit because working pay doesn't cover the rent - for whom there were few measures.

The Labour leader expressed anger that public servants have still seen no pay rise in seven years, due to the Government's freeze on pay, and that no funding security has been given to the NHS despite there being an obvious crisis, despite the fact that corporations are still going to get their year on year tax cut.

The Chancellor's budget has offered only a range of small spending increases, in a very concise series of measures, and it is hard to see them as sufficient. Analysts, such as Kamal Ahmed at the BBC, have characterised the budget as representing 'pain delayed' - taking advantage of the short term boost that Government finances are experiencing this year.

This is not the start of a public investment led drive to build a path out of austerity. With the debt and deficit still hanging heavily over Britain, these feel like stop-gap measures to assuage certain political pressures in the present, and to ease the way to the further austerity that waits ahead.

The Tory Facade: The healthcare crisis in Britain belies the Conservative presentation of their party as responsible stewards

The central claim that the Conservative Party makes, its fundamental promise to the electorate, is that it will be a responsible manager of the state. It tries to present its opponents as reckless ideologues, to be contrasted with their own sensible handling of public duties.

The current condition of the NHS exposes this claim as nothing more than a marketing campaign. The NHS remains the single most popular element of the public apparatus in Britain, even as it has descended into a period of prolonged crisis.

A report released today showed that beds have been filled beyond safe levels in 90% of hospitals over winter, with all the results of overcrowding that follow - in long waiting times and cancellations (Triggle, 2017).

It has been the tendency of the Prime Minister Theresa May at recent renditions of PMQs to deflect blame. On healthcare, her response has been to deflect it to the NHS administrators - claiming bad practice in the use of resources for shortfalls and service delivery (Merrick, 2016).

To back up that claim, the government says it has provided the funding the NHS asked for - but that is a half truth at best. The government has been accused by fact checkers, and Parliament's health committee, of fudging their numbers (Campbell, 2016).

While the government repeats its criticised claims of providing "$10 billion" of extra funds - with the reality being half of that - more parts of Britain's physical, mental health and social care service slide into crisis.

For instance: Social care is critically underfunded (Eichler, 2016). It was not protected from austerity and has been terribly withered by cuts to local government.

The Tories have no 'responsible' remedy. Talk of upfront charges for foreign patients (BBC, 2017), claims of bad practice in administration - these are cheap deflections, taking advantage of anti-immigration myths or falling back on tired austerity.

On social care, the Tories have responded with trivial tax powers for painfully stretched councils. But they will raise more in richer areas and less in poorer, and raise little in either case - only £200m nationally - to counteract the deep cuts that have ravaged the social care infrastructure (Merrick, 2016; BBC, 2016).

Standing back and observing the Conservative stewardship of health and social care, brings one of only two conclusions: incompetence or ideologically driven mismanagement. Whether deliberate or due to incompetence, the NHS is being undermined.

The public stood behind last year's strikes by junior doctors. But the pressure remains and continues to build. Progressives must start to dismantle the façade and show people the reality of the Conservative Party behind the marketing image.

The future of health and social care in Britain depends upon the public understanding its worth and seeing with their own eyes the devastating impact that Tory policies have had on this iconic symbol of progress in Britain.