The National Insurance rise, which came into effect today, is a breach of a Conservative manifesto promise, is piling fresh misery onto households that are already under financial stress, and is another unwelcome burden for businesses struggling with cost increases. It is also unclear what the money it will raise is actually for.

Notionally, it is intended to be used to clear the NHS backlog, and then go into social care. But calls to make the extra cash contingent on reforms to the health service have come to little and still the backlog is expected to grow. The Chancellor’s efforts to soften the impact of the NI increase on lower earners made a mockery of the pretence that the tax is hypothecated: there has been no obvious reduction in the money promised to the NHS even though the tax will now raise less.

Ministers say new spending should be funded by new taxation, an argument that has some merit given that future generations will have to bear the burden of extra debt. But if that spending is unlikely to deliver the results that the public expects, then it should not be happening in the first place. A succession of Tory leaders have given the NHS multi-billion pound packages, but the UK’s health outcomes remain poor by international comparison. As we report today, Britain is among the worst in the world at detecting cancer early, thanks in part to a broken system of primary care.

The false mantra that all the NHS needs is more money has resulted in a stunted political debate that refuses to take seriously those who suggest that we should look elsewhere in the world for ideas on how to improve the health service for patients. Too often, extra funding gets swallowed up by the health bureaucracy and, in the case of the National Insurance rise, the suspicion must be that much of it will be eaten up by wages. Already, pressure is growing on the Chancellor to give the service a more lavish pay settlement because of higher inflation, when millions of private sector employees can expect no such thing.

The Government presumably thought that it was pulling off the political coup of a generation – stealing Labour’s clothes and attempting to cement the Tories as the new party of the NHS. It is instead squeezing largely Tory voters in order to prop up an unreformed, and increasingly unpopular, socialised behemoth that too often shows more interest in its staff than its patients. The Conservative Party has made a historic mistake. It should expect to pay for it dearly.