The point is not merely technically correct, it is actually correct. If you want to say funding didn't go up enough for your liking, say so directly. Don't say something you know isn't true, and then when called on it try to wriggle out of it.
And as for the FT's take - "Tory austerity" didn't even balance the budget. The UK cannot afford to have the level of state spending it already has, let alone increase it yet further.
IMO the problem with austerity is that it presumed the economy would grow, which it then promptly didn't.
I won't pretend to have enough economic nous to know if Keynesianism is worth anything, but I do know it says to do the exact opposite: for governments to borrow and spend more in bad times to grow the economy, and pay down that debt only when things recover.
Austerity as a concept doesn't really presume that, austerity is just a weird word meaning a government cutting spending. It doesn't contain any argument about the future. The Tories implementation did presume growth which is why the UK had austerity-lite vs what actually turned out to be needed.
Keynesianism is a self-contradictory concept which is why it always fails. It's predicated on the assumption that governments are good at investing. But if that is true then governments have no answer back to the people who argue that good times = an even better time to invest, because if government ROI is always positive why would you not invest more when tax revenues are flowing freely? So in practice it immediately turns into high levels of government deficit spending all the time, because if you use wordplay to turn spending into "investment" then a deficit today can always be claimed to be paid off tomorrow from the ROI. So it's just an excuse for spending more than the tax take allows, all the time.
The problem with this theory is that governments are notoriously bad at investing. They are rarely in a position to even measure ROI let alone ensure it's positive. Beating the market is really hard even for full time expert investors, some argue it's impossible over the long run, and that's with the full accountability of market mechanisms in play. Without those you end up with Soviet-style "investment" in highly visible and labor-intensive heavy industry projects, or for the UK, an endless succession of heavy rail projects.
The UK cannot afford its current level of welfare and spending, along with most of the rest of Europe. Unless the economy suddenly goes into overdrive the future will have far more austerity, along with many angry citizens faced with broken promises and rotting, decaying infrastructure.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...