Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is demanding that Prime Minister Theresa May promises to spend more on state-funded healthcare -- or risk losing the next election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Johnson campaigned during the 2016 Brexit referendum to leave the European Union, telling voters the U. could afford to allocate an extra 350 million pounds ($483 million) a week to the National Health Service if it no longer had to make payments to the EU. He wasn’t a minister in the government at the time, and May’s administration has yet to honor Johnson’s referendum promise.
The claim was widely criticized, with the U. Statistics Authority saying it was potentially misleading and official data showing the amount the U. sends the EU per week is about 180 million pounds. But Johnson doubled down on the promise earlier this week, saying he "grossly underestimated” the amount of cash that would become available. The statistics authority has been asked to audit the latest claim too.
Read more: Boris Fights Back
Now a senior cabinet minister, he’s demanding that the prime minister pledge more funding -- an extra 5.2 billion pounds a year -- on free public medical care after Brexit or open the door to the socialist leader of the main opposition Labour party Jeremy Corbyn. The initial pledge of 350 million pounds would add up to about 18 billion pounds a year.
Johnson’s move, first reported by the Telegraph, comes as hospitals are struggling to cope with a surge in demand and the opposition Labour Party has made campaigning on the health service its top priority.
May’s government, divided over Brexit, is trying to find a consensus position on what it wants its future relationship with the EU to be after the divorce. Johnson, a potential rival to May for the party leadership, favors a clean break that would allow the U. to make trade deals across the globe, and break free from EU regulation and court rulings. Others in Cabinet favor tighter ties, even if that would mean being bound to rules made in Brussels.
Euroskeptic Conservatives outside the government are holding May to account and have criticized some of the concessions she has already had to make in order to get an initial deal with the EU in December. Hardline pro-Brexit lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg has been chosen to lead a group of Tory euro-skeptics, the European Research Group, the Telegraph reported, in a sign they are preparing to step up the fight for a clean break.
The next few months will be crucial in deciding what Brexit looks like. At the end of January the two sides will begin discussing the transition period that May hopes will follow the U.’s departure from the bloc in 2019. In March, they’re due to start discussing the future terms of trade -- once both sides have decided what they want.
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