THE need of the extreme right wing to muddy the political waters by using smoke and mirrors alongside dodgy statistics was never more evident than in A Edwards letter to last week’s Guardian.
He/she quite rightly berates New Labour who ‘expanded’ hospital PFIs (Private Finance Initiatives) but somehow neglects to inform us that the Conservative Party were responsible for initiating them.
A national audit report of June 17 2010 says: ‘Contractors who secure economies of scale through managing multiple PFI contracts are rarely required to share these efficiency gains with trusts’.
That was 2010 and now in 2014 the financial supporters of the Conservative Party and friends of the cabinet ministers are queuing up to manage multiple NHS contracts in the knowledge that any ‘efficiency gains’ accrued simply through cutbacks to the detriment of patients, will be counted as pure profit.
In a recent talk on the privatisation of the NHS Professor Allyson Pollock stated ‘The job of a commercial provider is to find a treatment that you don’t necessarily need but that somebody will pay for’.
It seems that under this Government the sick and infirm are going to pay dearly.
Graham Brinksman, Fearnhead
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