GORDON Brown has warned that nurses will have to take part in charity fun runs to pay for the NHS in an independent Scotland.
Writing in the Scotsman, the former Labour Prime Minister said the NHS would be in “trauma” if Scotland voted Yes to independence in the next ten years.
The warnings were ridiculed by a spokesman for new Health Secretary Jeane Freeman, who described them as “utter nonsense”.
Brown said: “The NHS at 80 years old would, sadly, be in trauma if independence should ever happen.
“What has become clear from the SNP’s Growth Commission blueprint is that public spending would rise less than under Tory austerity and that even then, any new money there is would be eaten up by massive interest rate payments on what would be almost £100 billion of new Scottish debt.
“While in both Scotland and the UK, the NHS will need 5% more each year to meet the unprecedented needs of a rising elderly population, the more likely fate of the NHS in an independent Scotland is a diminished service under even more intolerable pressures than now.
“Whatever the SNP say, the NHS is not safe in their hands.
“I recall ten years ago when I was Prime Minister, we held a service of commemoration at Westminster Abbey to celebrate 60 years of the NHS – and the most powerful speech on that day came from one of the service’s first nurses who vividly described the bleak conditions that existed before 1948.
“She forcefully reminded us that hard-working nurses had to leave the beds of their patients to run charity flag days, just to pay for life-saving equipment.
“We cannot return there,” he added.
Freeman’s spokesperson said: “This is utter nonsense from Gordon Brown, who knows full well that the biggest threat to Scotland’s NHS comes from the very real prospect of a post-Brexit trade deal being forced on us against our will by a Tory UK government.
They added: “That could
see our health service becoming a sacrificial pawn in a Tory-Trump trade deal, thanks to the Westminster power grab on Holyrood.”
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