Vote Leave needs to stop pretending the NHS has anything to do with the EU - it really doesn't

Both sides seem to be happy to keep the focus away from the real questions

George Osborne on a visit to a hospital with Jeremy Hunt (Rex)

As the EU referendum campaign began formally on Friday, we might have expected the Out camp to have raised one of its key themes: getting back control of our laws or our borders, perhaps, or how we would survive and prosper economically outside the EU?

Instead, Vote Leave campaigned on the NHS, even though it has very little to do with the EU at all. Stretching their own argument to breaking point, the Outers claimed that money could be diverted to our cash-starved NHS if we no longer had to send “£350m a week” to Brussels.

They even appeared to blame this week’s poor accident and emergency performance statistics on spending money instead on “EU bureaucrats”.

Vote Leave's misleading figures imply we pay £18bn a year into the EU. In fact, taking account of what we get back reduces it to £10bn. If we vote to leave in June, then any government would be under strong pressure to use the savings on matters now funded by the EU such as payments to farmers, aid to poor regions and scientific research. It is nonsense to suggest that Brexit would be a magic wand for the NHS.

Yet there is method in the Out camp’s madness. It is happy to have any kind of row about the EU and money, even if its own figures are wrong, because it reminds voters that EU membership comes with a price tag.

Never mind the quality; just talk about the money. That is why Vote Leave is delighted by the row over the £9m cost of sending a government leaflet about the referendum to every household.

We shouldn’t be surprised by its approach. The two officials who run Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, used exactly the same tactic in referendums in which they opposed reform of the voting system and a North East regional assembly respectively. They talked up the cost of the proposed change -- and won both contests.

Although Elliott also ran the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which backed radical reform of the NHS and a shift to an insurance-based system, he now seems to be a passionate defender of our health service’s public funding.

Other Outers, such as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Daniel Hannan, have also questioned the NHS in its current form. Why are the Outers suddenly wearing "I love the NHS" badges? Because it gives them a chance to reach out beyond their core support to floating voters among NHS workers and relatively well-off people who care about the health service.

It also hands the Outers the opportunity to raise their most potent issue - immigration - without appearing to do so. Here’s Priti Patel, the Employment Minister, supposedly talking about health: “It is becoming clear that our membership of the EU is putting the NHS under threat. Every week we send £350m to Brussels - that’s money that could be better invested in helping patients who rely on our NHS. What we get back from the EU is a city the size of Newcastle (population 288,000) of new immigrants to the UK every year. Current levels of migration are causing unsustainable pressures on our public services and we can see that the NHS is creaking under the strain.” And the Outers accuse the In camp of running Project Fear.

True, there is one issue where the EU might impinge on health. There are genuine fears that the EU’s planned trade deal with the US – TTIP - could allow private health companies to provide services now run by the NHS.

The European Commission and the British Government insists that guarantees are in place to prevent that. But David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary who left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981 partly because Labour was then anti-EU, is now campaigning for an Out vote.

He cites a threat to the NHS from TTIP and EU single market rules promoting competition. Jeremy Corbyn, who has changed places with Lord Owen since the 1975 referendum, is worried that TTIP could lead to privatisation but in his long overdue intervention in the referendum on Thursday, he argued that it would be much better to campaign for EU reform from inside rather than hand control to the “free market enthusiasts in the Leave campaign”.

In this game of playground politics, Outers claim that Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, started the squabble over the NHS. He warned last month that the “economic shock” of leaving the EU “would inevitably leave less money for public services like the NHS”.

That was stretching it a bit, but Hunt also had a more relevant argument. He warned that some of the 100,000 skilled EU workers who work in health and social care might leave Britain if we quit because of doubts over their visas and residence permits.

The Tory-dominated Vote Leave’s response to Hunt was revealing: it blamed the NHS cash crisis on Hunt and David Cameron. Now it hopes the spotlight on the Prime Minister's family wealth will damage him further. “Every five points off his trust rating is worth one point to us in the In/Out battle,” smiled one leading Outer.

Both sides should stick to the real questions rather than bombard voters with misleading propaganda on everything under the sun. Very big issues are at stake in this referendum, but the NHS is not one of them.