With all due respect to Stephen Hammond, the MP for Wimbledon, if he is going to describe one of my letters as 'inaccurate' then he needs to check his facts first, because I am quite happy to prove that every detail of what I said is correct.
A good place for him to do research is the Wimbledon Guardian's excellent (free) website, which also includes a huge amount of readership response to the proposed St Helier closure proposals.
The other word for 'readership' is 'electorate'.
Either Dr Marilyn Plant is right to tell us that BSBV (Better Services Better Value) is 'merely a 'consultative group making recommendations to the health secretary' or Mr Hammond is correct to tell us that it's all the fault of BSBV, and Jeremy Hunt and the government are innocent of all blame.
So meanwhile Dr Plant is being set up to take the blame, just as I said she would. But she shouldn't be.
What she said is absolutely true.
I disagree completely with her views, but she is really a very fine doctor who is being lured into a bear trap.
Given all the lives she has saved during her life that is really not acceptable. She is being used by cynical apparatchiks. And their bosses.
And I'm fascinated to hear that Jeremy Hunt had no involvement in the proposed closure of Lewisham hospital, given the tiny little detail that his name is on the court papers and he was referred to by Mr Justice Silber in his summing up (of the Labour Group's successful appeal against his unlawful decision) and given that none of us are actually stupid, I'm sure the readers of this paper will have noticed Mr Hammond's reference to the 'decision to close Lewisham hospital'.
Remember that you read it here first. Susanne Evans of UKIP currently has 22 percent of the Wimbledon vote, so now the local Conservative Party have gone into this terrified state of denial, where everything that is falling apart in the NHS is suddenly the fault of Dr Marilyn Plant.
The notorious PFI's (Private Finance Initiatives) were indeed introduced by Labour. Nobody, least of all the Tories who supported the idea, could possibly have known that horrendous levels of corporate greed would destroy them.
And what Mr Hammond forgets to tell us is the sad fact that both David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt have adopted PFI's as their official government policy for funding the NHS.
Perhaps Mr Hammond will tell us when he proposes to tell his leader and health secretary that he no longer supports their policies?
The new Alder Hey hospital development in Liverpool is funded entirely by a PFI deal negotiated by the Tories, that manages to be completely pointless and totally unaffordable.
It would have been much cheaper to just give the hospital the money straight from the treasury.
And because the deal is so exorbitant the ultimate cost to the tax-payers when we ultimately have to bail out the hospital will be monumental.
This all comes down to an issue of choice.
Closing down our hospitals will destroy the NHS. That is therefore a decision that can only be taken by the electorate in a general election.
Hopefully one that is run rather differently to the last one.
And I don't have 'cronies', I have noble friends who are trying to defend Nye Bevan's great legacy, our NHS.
Michael Barltrop, via email
- What do you think? Send your letter to: letters@wimbledonguardian.co.uk.
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