Government seems to be defunding and demoralising NHS
“THEY didn’t believe they could win the election if they told you what they were going to do.”
So said Michael Portillo (ex-Conservative MP and government minister) talking about Conservative plans for our NHS during an interview in 2013.
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act has taken away the Secretary of State’s duty to provide a national health service in England, opened up the NHS to private firms and complicated bureaucracy.
The NHS is now in chaos as the government has continued with a policy of defunding and demoralising the people who work in it.
We are told that the problems are due to an ageing population and a need for austerity, but Britain is a rich country.
Theresa May in spite of her speech to ‘make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us’ has just refused to give the service more money.
But, the government want to dismantle and privatise the NHS and indeed the latest plan is to force Stockport and all other areas to put together plans to integrate health and social care.
This is called Stockport Together. The plans are expected to deliver savings and as hospital care is more expensive, services will move from Stepping Hill into the community.
More beds will close in the new year. As a distinct health and social care unit, Stockport Together is ripe for privatisation.
We can stop this if the NHS is taken back to how it was before the destructive 2012 act.
Margaret Greenwood MP is attempting to do this by bring a cross party NHS Reinstatement Bill into Parliament for its second reading on November 4.
We need our MPs to support this and we can ask them to do this by writing to them. There is more detail about the bill at www.nhsbill2015.org and a specimen letter is available at www. stockportnhswatch.co.uk.
If we don’t make a stance, the NHS will disappear and health insurance will become a reality. Is that what we want? Remember, it is our NHS. Deborah Hind Bramhall
WE MUST SAVE POISE BROOK
I BELIEVE there is nothing more beautiful than nature, we see its majesty every time we take a simple walk through the woods.
My daughter and I took the Poise Brook Nature Reserve trail last week and we talked about how those ancient trees have outlived kings and queens, knights and villains and are still alive and here to enchant us in 2016.
And then sadly we stumbled upon a piece of laminated A4 nailed to a tree which basically told us that our nature reserve was potentially going to be smashed to smithereens to make way for a bypass to accommodate the traffic between the congested Hazel Grove A6 and congested lower Bredbury.
Sort of like a holding area really with five sets of traffic lights to keep things crawling along while the cars that are not on the bypass can crawl a little faster than they did before.
I feel so sad about the Goyt Valley SOS article in last week’s Stockport Express.
Sad for what is proposed for our little corner of Offerton in the name of ‘progress,’ ie the rape and violation of the lungs of our earth for the sake of getting from A to B a little faster.
And if our precious valley and its innocent wild creatures are destroyed by selfish human recklessness, it will never ever recover.
The spread of tarmac and exhaust fumes is like a bacterial disease stabbing into the heart of our diminishing green spaces so the rot needs to stop right now. Kate Burke Offerton
PARKING IS A REAL PROBLEM
IF you were a newcomer to Stockport, coming to shop would you be able to find a place to park?
With all the diversion signs and roads blocked off (i.e. Newbridge Lane) even though for the last 65 years of living in this town I know only of one place to park and that is Merseyway car park.
I have asked a lot of people their opinion and their answer is I am afraid they do not go into Stockport any more and to be honest I have changed my shopping habits and I do not go into building sites where no one is working except for a few men (in my building trade experience these sites would be packed with workers). So now I shop elsewhere! M D Cawley Offerton
HARD TO SPOT THE CLOWNS
WITH all the recent publicity about clowns. The way people dress and act these days I find it difficult to distinguish which ones are the clowns. Jim Mcguinn Stockport
USING CARS LESS IS ANSWER
I HOPE Rachel Houghton is successful in her attempt to stop the building of a bypass from Simpsons Corner to the M60.
In her excellent letter she details the downside of such a road, but we know all too well from experience, that both the government and the council will give main consideration to the need for traffic flow and the economic stimulus.
I think that if people were to use their cars more sparingly, traffic flow would improve without building extra roads.
It is worth considering that the true cost of our car journeys is probably much higher than many might care to imagine.
Everyone knows that running a car is not cheap, but it is the hidden costs which are the hammer blow. Only this week, we learn from the publication of a major study that the number of Britons getting cancer is set to raise to 500,000 a year.
Pollution from vehicles causes much cancer. It also causes thousands of respiratory deaths annually. The answer to these challenges and also to that of climate change is to leave your car at home whenever you can. John Tyers Marple