Do folk not understand they can object to privatisation of the NHS?

Are all those doctors, nurses and medical support staff going to let themselves be sold like cattle? All those hospitals, clinics and transportation given to investment companies to be rented back at inflated prices?

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I read that when Thatcher tried to sell off Scottish water boards people came out to protest and oppose.

The ministers are a few individuals and “we” are millions – do folk not understand they can object and stop them? Is the NHS precious, but not enough to do anything to protect it?

It may seem these MPs only exist in TV studios, but they do actually live among us and have offices in our constituencies. Is it beyond folk to protest at those offices and make their views know?

Brian Powell
St Andrews

THE evidence is mounting that English Labour is coming for Scotland’s health service.

We Own It asked all Scottish candidates to commit to increasing NHS funding by £3.9 billion per year, oppose further privatisation and bring outsourced services back into the NHS. Not a single “Scottish” Labour candidate signed the pledge, under orders from their English bosses.

Since 2012, £6.7bn (£10 million per week) has left the NHS budget as private-company profits from outsourcing contracts for services that the NHS can and does already deliver in many places. The figure for Scotland is £374.3m.

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We Own It said ending NHS privatisation could more than triple English Labour’s plan to deliver 40,000 more GP appointments per week, 700,000 new dental appointments each year and double NHS diagnostic capacity.

Surprisingly, just 40% of SNP candidates signed the pledge, another sign that the SNP, as a colonial administration, isn’t representing the majority of Scots who strongly oppose selling off their health service.

Outsourcing a nation’s health to private companies for profit is a stupid idea. A recent study by Oxford University found that outsourcing leads to worse patient outcomes. The BMJ’s Commission on the Future of the NHS revealed that outsourcing NHS catering harmed patients. And peer-reviewed research found that hospitals cleaned by private companies are dirtier and spread more hospital-acquired infections such as the deadly MRSA than those cleaned by in-house NHS staff.

The Scottish health service won’t be safe in English Labour’s hands. Our so-called Scottish Labour representatives won’t dare cross Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer as they sell off the remainder of the UK’s last great public service to satisfy their private healthcare donors.

Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh

“IT is certain that conflict over trans people has been promoted by right-wing actors, notably within the media, and is part of a wider trend of reactionary conspiracies across the Western world. Younger voters are likely to be appalled by the social conservatism of some well-known SNP politicians, while the promotion of a rural fundamentalist to high office has seemed incomprehensible” – Dr Charlie Lynch (Letters, Jul 8).

Really? Certainly, the people behind the “trans” lobby, financing it, are on the right, or, rather, they are corporate globalists, eg Jennifer (James) Pritzker, Chicago billionaire, to name one, and the corporate lawyers who drew up the Stonewall “manifesto” whereby they were enabled to infiltrate every public and private institution, national and local politics etc. Now, why should they have done that? To ensure that everyone has a roof over his or her head? To sweep away food banks and their necessity?

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The people on the front-line, however, and the academics who encourage them are decidedly on the left – the hard left. It was in academia that this movement began life, and it was in America’s and Canada’s top universities that it blossomed into a fully-fledged “trans” rights movement, usurping LGB and female rights, something unheard of until recent times. No group fighting for its rights has ever done so at the expense of another group, but always on its own merits.

This insistence that the gender issue is one on the right or far right of politics is nonsensical unless you equate females fighting to retain their lawful rights under UK legislation irredeemably as all right-wing, and LGB people witnessing the return of “conversion therapy” in its original form as also rampant right-wingers.

Yes, Europe is becoming more conservative (small “c”), but it is not as a result of fascism, but as a result of the misplaced and ultimately self-defeating left-wing liberalism that has enabled massive societal changes and experiments by politicians and their corporate backers to be perpetrated against ordinary people all over Europe, including the UK (Thatcherite neoliberalism, whether Tory or Labour) without a by-your-leave, and, incidentally, has left less and less money to circulate throughout the economy for those who need it most.

Lorncal
via email