The news is that NHS waiting lists are up, to their highest for a decade:

About 4m people were waiting for National Health Service treatment at the end of June — the highest figure for almost a decade — according to the latest official data.

This is, apparently and according to one distinguished academic, proof of the iniquities of the Tories and of austerity:

It was bankers who created the Crisis. It wasn’t Labour. It wasn’t excess spending. If either had been true it would not have started elsewhere and been global. Excessive banking practices, deliberate deception and a far too relaxed attitude to regulation, based on neoliberal thinking, was what created the Crash.

Discussion on the anniversary has noted all too often how banking has recovered and is now robust and ready for the next downturn, which few now deny is on its way. I agree with the latter, I am not sure banking is that much stronger (time will tell) and like many I remain quite appropriately aggrieved at banks’ and bankers’ near risk free recovery.

But what has been too little noticed is the effect. The lost wages. The growing inequality. The creation of insecurity for most people as the price of strengthened bank balance sheets.

And NHS waiting lists: the sign that the state has shrunk under a wholly unnecessary policy of austerity that has let the neoliberals win and cost us all, dearly.

Umm, yes. Note that the complaint is that NHS waiting lists are now as high as they were near a decade ago, that's actually in Dec 2007. That's before the crash, in fact that's still when Brown was shovelling ever more into every public service he could find.

Logic therefore tells us that this intervening decade of Tories, of austerity, of the slaughter of everything social democracy holds holy, has in fact reduced NHS waiting lists.

We'd love to know where they buy their logical arguments really. We can spot a business opportunity there in competing with their current supplier.