Letters: my prescription for the NHS is a new Beveridge report…

My prescription for the NHS? A new Beveridge report…

With parents who were scared if we children became ill because of the “doctor’s bills”, we welcomed the 1942 Beveridge report, which led to the NHS (“Our hospitals are on brink of collapse”, News, last week).

I spent 40 years as a GP, conducting home births, looking after families, caring for the elderly. Twenty years after retirement, the picture seems very different. We have an ageing population with expanding health and social needs and the expectation that public funds should continue largely to provide this.

But the birth of the NHS was a very different time from the present, and I believe we need an up-to-date, apolitical review, akin to Beveridge, to guide us on the provision of medical and social care today. This might help the NHS to avoid being the political football it is.
Godfrey Fowler
Emeritus professor of general practice, Oxford University

The NHS is disintegrating and, as you quoted last week, a government spokesman blames “the aging population” again. Well, we’ve all been here for at least 70-plus years, so why the surprise! And what colossal mismanagement to slash funding to councils for social care while at the same time diverting millions of pounds from patient care to PFI companies. Then to alienate the hardworking and dedicated workforce of which there is already a shortfall. 

It is a frightening prospect for us seniors, who have paid in all our lives, to find that the care may not be there now that we need it. There must be an urgent public inquiry – and it must not ignore this leeching of funds to companies, many of which have MPs and peers on their boards, who are making money at our expense. There is no point putting further money in if it just goes to these people.
Carol Terry
London SW18 

Brexit was built on fraud

Andrew Tampion argues “the time has come to accept the result” of the EU referendum (“Take Brexit on the chin”, Letters, last week). I and others have considerable difficulty in accepting such reasoning. The outcome of the referendum was a debacle, if not an out-and-out fraud.

We know that lies were told regarding such matters as the amount of money Britain actually gives to the EU and the supposed benefits of an exit to organisations like the NHS. It has become clear that many people did not vote on the substantive issue of the referendum but rather sought to show their contempt for the political ruling class, thus the senseless result.

To have a referendum in a democracy, there must be a well-educated electorate; that, all too evidently, was not the case. Many people simply had no clue how laws are invoked within the EU structure. It was a simple matter of making the argument that laws are enacted by an unelected “commission”, a fiction gainfully employed by those politicians reliant on a large measure of ignorance.

In no way am I, along with many other people, prepared to accept the Brexit result. We want justice with the truth at centre stage. I appreciate that there is little chance of any real reckoning with those who so casually sought to mislead many people, given that they now hold high government positions, but the argument that we must move on simply will not wash.
Francis Durham
Rickmansworth, Herts

The centre cannot hold…

Your paper quotes a poll (News, last week) that asks people where they see themselves on the political spectrum. The proportions were as follows: leftwing 10%; centre left 15%; centre 45%; centre right 17% and rightwing 13%. From these numbers is derived the figure that 77% consider themselves centrist or right of centre, a figure that includes those who are left of centre. On that basis, one could argue that the same 77% consider themselves centrist or left of centre. One could emphasise that nearly half (45%) are in the centre, or that most (55%), identify in some way as left or right. Or one could just print the numbers and stop messing around.
Jeremy Hardy
London SW16

Heartbreaking comedy

It’s great to read that the National Theatre has the courage to stage a musical about a woman with cancer (“I hate musicals. I thought I could do them better”, Observer New Review, last week). But the powers-that-be might also like to a take  a look at Britney, the quite brilliant work of playwright Charly Clive and ex-Cambridge Footlighter Ellen Robertson, in which they tell the story of Charly’s experience with brain cancer. I saw it at the Edinburgh fringe last month. It was one of the best things I’ve seen in years. Achingly funny and desperately moving.
Vivien Graveson
St Albans

Put your shirt on it…

In  an edition with various features on poverty, the NHS  and inequality, I was amused to find the following copy adjacent to an image of a female fashion model (Observer Magazine, last week): “For clothes that look super posh but aren’t super expensive try Modern Rarity John Lewis Palmer/Harding shirt £150”. Since when was £150 not expensive for a shirt?
Stephen Brain
London SE10

Letters: my prescription for the NHS is a new Beveridge report…