Health check: Kinnock backs NHS funding

The government should establish a dedicated tax to fund the National Health Service, the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock has said.

In a rare foray into the domestic political debate, Kinnock - now the vice president of the EU commission, says the NHS needs some strong medicine to cure its ills. So bad is the problem, believes Kinnock, that Tony Blair should treat NHS reform as if he were fighting "a war" upon which "national survival" depended.

"Support for the NHS is so universal and unique that it justifies that establishment of a hypothecated system of finance," he said.

"That is to say some taxes are cut and replaced with a specific national health and community care tax so that the British public know that every penny of that is going into the national health and community care services and that if investment in those services prove deficient the consequence is that the nation pays a little bit more," Kinnock told the Guardian.