HERE’S a cautionary tale that should make us all very afraid of what will happen to the NHS if the Tories are returned to power.

A friend of mine was taken ill and following a home visit by his GP was told to await transport that would take him to a ward at Southmead Hospital.

The request for transport was duly logged but no action was taken.

Eventually an emergency ambulance had to be called after my friend had waited for seven hours.

The crew that turned up bizarrely tried to take him to Gloucestershire Royal instead.

Because my friend is assertive he succeeded in getting taken to Southmead where the crew dumped him in A & E despite knowing that a bed on a ward awaited him.

After further delay he got to the ward only to find his booked bed had been given to another patient so (you’ve guessed it!) he ended up being treated on a trolley in a corridor.

The Tories claim that the NHS is adequately funded because they have increased expenditure.

But at the same time they are demanding that the system delivers £22 billion efficiency savings by 2020.

The truth is that the NHS is grossly underfunded because just to stand still it needs a four per cent annual increase.

What most journalists fail to report is that per capita expenditure (the widely accepted way of documenting expenditure) is actually falling.

In fact the NHS is being wrecked by privatisation which, as the US example shows, vastly increases costs and creates wonderful opportunities for fraud.

Beware - the NHS is not safe in Theresa May’s hands and beware the Liberal Democrats who signed up to the Langsley Bill that provides the mechanism for segmenting the service ready for root and branch privatisation.

Curiously the Lib Dems got a lot of stick for their U-turn on tuition fees but their contribution to the destruction of the NHS goes unchallenged.

Needless to say it is only the Labour Party, who founded the NHS in the teeth of Tory opposition, that has the ability to stop the betrayal.

Andy Treacher

Stroud