MADAM –With regard to Neil Carmichael’s opinion piece, ‘A Record of Achievement’

1. In the late 1940s, with a national debt of more than 200 per cent of GDP (twice what it is now), we avoided default and set up the welfare state and NHS.

Privatising and cutting the public sector does not increase people’s disposable income or enable us out of recession.

2. Saying the NHS budget is protected is misleading.

It is not ring-fenced fully when it shares care with social care services, which have been cut drastically.

3. The £14bn put in to the NHS is eaten away by the increased marketisation of services, buying and selling treatments as if goods to be bartered for, unwanted reforms, the cost of tendering and profits to share-holders.

4. The opening of Vale Hospital was welcomed, but there has been a reduction of more than 140 beds in Gloucestershire since 2010.

5. It’s not true to say there’s no threat to Stroud Hospital; already it’s lost its out-of-hours contract and its pharmacy services have been put out to tender.

6. Mr Carmichael is right in saying PFI (introduced by the Conservatives in 1992) is “utterly irrational”.

7. What is actually meant by 17,000 more ‘clinical’ staff?

8. Wales had disproportionately higher cuts and rather than ‘ring-fence’ the NHS budget, is looking to invest in disease prevention, public health and in social care.

Wales may have problems now, but they are on a better trajectory than England.

Hannah Basson

Stroud Against the Cuts Coordinator