This too:- Yes, we CAN afford the NHS!
Much has been said about the problems with the NHS but far too many people have been misled by the Conservatives into thinking that we can’t afford to pay for it, but the truth is that yes, we CAN! We are still the 6th richest country in the world so it’s simply a matter of political priorities, and for this government, tax cuts for the better off matter far more than the health of ordinary citizens, like us.

Just one reason we’ve been told that we can’t afford the NHS is because people in our government who are purposely starving the NHS, have personally invested in private health care companies. So they are deliberately underfunding the NHS in order to privatise it further. Another, more sinister reason is that these people are ideologically opposed to the very idea of the “public service ethos” that underpins our NHS, and believe that everything that moves should be subject to the ruthless profiteering logic of the “free market”. “The price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

Of course, what most people haven’t realised, is that much of our NHS has already effectively been privatised, so much of the money paid into it actually goes into paying profits for the owners and shareholders of these private companies (some of whom don’t even pay taxes in the UK). PFI (the Private Finance Initiative) is also a disaster, as it forces hospitals to borrow money at higher rates than they were previously able to when they could borrow direct from the government. Some hospitals have been bankrupted due to to the escalation of borrowing rates, eg I understand that St Bartholomew’s in London is paying £2million per WEEK in interest payments alone! THIS is the main problem!

After all, the government only had to ask and the Bank of England printed £375billions to bail out our misbehaving banks – and there’s always plenty of money for wars and bombs with which to kill innocent people. Also, in recent years our Tory government has given tax breaks worth £70billions to millionaires and corporations, whilst cutting funds to much needed services. As Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said in a recent interview, these tax giveaways could be reversed and the money paid into the NHS, where it would do far more good.

Money paid into the NHS does not go into a big, bottomless pit. It goes into paying for doctors, nurses and many other workers, who (in addition to caring for people, saving their lives, curing them, and in many cases getting them back into productive work), pay taxes and spend money, which helps the economy to prosper.

Other problems created by government cuts, are low staffing levels due to redundancies, staff leaving through stress and general unhappiness, together with EU citizens who feel they are no longer welcomed here and other foreign workers who don’t earn enough to satisfy the government’s unrealistic requirements which would entitle them to stay. Also nurses’ bursaries being cut, so many can no longer afford to train in the profession, as well as the cut in care services for the disabled and elderly, which have placed an intolerable strain on hospitals that have been forced to bear the brunt of this government’s incompetence.

The Labour Party wants to defend and save our NHS, which is at increasingly great risk from our current government. Jeremy Corbyn supports the Reinstatement Bill which would do away with this horrendously expensive privatisation; he has always been against PFI, arguing that the NHS will have to repay “six times the original investment in them”.

The Labour Party created the NHS back in 1948; the Conservatives opposed it then, and have been at best half-hearted supporters of it ever since. Even Thatcher didn’t have the gall to go as far as the current government has towards destroying our NHS!

Wanda Lozinska
Stroud

Stroud News and Journal, April 2017
(But they didn’t print the last two paragraphs)!