I DON’T impugn Stroud MP Neil Carmichael’s sincerity when he comes out in high-profile public support of our minor injuries unit (“I… want to keep our minor injury and illness unit open”, SNJ, September 7), but I do challenge his flagrant double standards.

Across the land the NHS is being systematically decimated by this Conservative government with savage cuts and closures, shamelessly breaking their manifesto commitments and ripening it for full-scale private health insurance and effective privatisation.

And in many of those areas affected, you’ll see local Tory MPs like Neil wringing their hands in public to anyone who’ll listen, bemoaning the closures and claiming to “support our NHS”.

Yet what are those self-same MPs doing to challenge their own government’s scorched-earth policy towards our NHS? What are they doing proactively to reverse their own government’s anti-NHS policies? – absolutely nothing.

These are double -standards and dishonesty of the very worst kind, expedient crocodile tears and earnest hand-wringing when it suits them, but deafening silence where it really matters – in challenging their own government’s appalling policies.

It’s becoming painfully clear, if it wasn’t already, that our precious NHS isn’t remotely safe in Tory hands, and it’s going to be imperative that the British people return a Labour government in 2020, if the NHS that we all love and cherish isn’t going to be flogged off to profit-driven privateers with no interest whatsoever in the health of the nation.

Dr Richard House

Stroud