The amazing thing about the NHS (“If British identity is bound up with the NHS, what do we lose in going private?”, Comment) is that in a society where paid-for education enhances people’s life chances, class is ignored in the treatment of NHS patients.
Everyone expects to get good care because they need it, not because they can afford it. I find this miraculous, but the miracle will not survive the deterioration of standards of care now becoming apparent. Once it is clear that those who can pay will get better care than those who can’t, equality disappears and we are back to poor services for the poor, as in the US, for example.
This matters profoundly and is why the growth of private care will in itself undermine the NHS, quite apart from the economic forces that come into play once the NHS is not the dominant provider of healthcare, the setter of standards of excellence and innovation and the place where clinicians want to work, as it has been in the past. The NHS has been starved of resources and needs to be rescued, otherwise we will lose it.
Put clinicians back in control. Get rid of the market in the NHS and save the 10% of the budget that goes to administer it. Then fund the NHS adequately, up to the level of our European neighbours, from general taxation as originally intended. National Insurance cannot provide adequate sums and was never designed to fund the NHS. Those who have become increasingly wealthy in the last 40 years should pay the most, as with other core government expenditure.
Jeanne Warren
Garsington, Oxford
Johnson’s comeback plan
Andrew Rawnsley informed us that Dominic Cummings has a “wacky” conspiracy theory that Boris Johnson expects Liz Truss to “blow up” as prime minister, opening the door for him to return (“Liz Truss reminds me of a Conservative leader but it’s not Margaret Thatcher”, Comment).
Our disgraced prime minister will know better than most that neither of the Tory leadership candidates is remotely fit for high office. It is quite feasible that his successor will have to stand down before the next general election, once their manifold inadequacies become clear to Tory MPs who could force and win a vote of no confidence in him or her.
This turn of events is plausible given Johnson’s Churchillian fantasies, the self-preservation instincts of Tory MPs and their party’s lust for power.
Mike Pender
Cardiff
Labour must reconsider ban
The Labour party has a proud tradition of anti-racist and anti-sexist campaigning, and Labour governments passed much of the UK’s flagship anti-discrimination legislation. That work is the reason many of us joined Labour in the first place.
It is therefore a huge source of disappointment to us, as Labour parliamentarians, that since Michael Savage’s report on 3 July, (“Labour accused of silencing women in row over sex-based rights group”, News), the party has continued to refuse a conference stand to Labour Women’s Declaration, which advocates for women’s sex-based rights. The discussion about women’s rights and gender self-identification has become highly charged. However, as legislators, we feel we have much to learn about this subject, from recent decisions by NHS England about gender identity services to court rulings and developments in public policy.
Just as we have all appreciated and benefited from the presence of other campaign groups at conference, we had hoped that the presence of Labour Women’s Declaration’s stand, alongside those of groups with other perspectives such as LGBT Labour, would be an opportunity for us all to learn more.
We are all striving for Labour to be the next party of government, and for government to be able to make laws and policies that take into account the needs and interests of all our citizens. We therefore call upon the party to reconsider its decision.
Labour MPs: Tonia Antoniazzi, Feryal Clark, Marsha de Cordova, Rosie Duffield, Julie Elliott, Mary Glindon, Diana Johnson, Steve McCabe. Labour Peers: Dianne Hayter, Philip Hunt, Estelle Morris, David Triesman, Tony Young.
Marvels of the moors
Alastair Fitter’s description of heather moorland as a monoculture is like describing ancient woodland as a monoculture of trees (“Bad seed: we’re being invaded by green and purple monsters…”, Magazine). The 1992 Rio convention on biodiversity ratified the global importance of UK heather moorland. These moors support 13 biological communities and 18 species of European or international importance and 77 species of invertebrates thrive in heather-dominated habitats in the UK, of which 32 species are known to depend on heather for their survival.
If we wish to improve biodiversity we must protect rare habitats and the species that rely on them.
Amanda Anderson, director,
the Moorland Association
The plots that are no joke
I feel for John Stonehouse’s daughter, Julia, over her concerns about the forthcoming drama based on her father’s life (“Fraud scandal MP’s family in plea over new TV drama”, News).
There is a deeply annoying trend in British TV drama to reduce key political scandals to a jokey pieces of entertainment. They are kind of Boris-lite, in which nothing is taken seriously (A Very English Scandal) and historical facts and recent research are jettisoned (The Trial of Christine Keeler). The prevailing conservative elites continue to write the history of the past and often the source cited to back up these dubious slices of history is the very organisation that should be under investigation, ie the security service, which, in the case of Stonehouse, played a very dubious role indeed.
Stephen Dorril
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire
Ramsay Street’s revenge?
Your assessment of the influence of Neighbours on British culture (“Last night for the Poms: 10 ways that Neighbours left its mark on Britain”, Focus) omitted one important sociolinguistic consequence.
The Australian soap helped popularise rising intonation among young people, the raising of pitch at the end of a sentence so that all statements sound like a question. This speech pattern, previously only heard around the Bristol area, has now become general in the UK. Even among older people?
Mike Hine
Kingston on Thames
