Stephen Hawking is doing Labour’s job for it (Why won’t Jeremy Hunt come clean? 26 August) in challenging Jeremy Hunt’s continuing distortions and misrepresentation of the truth about the NHS (Stephen Hawking is wrong about our NHS plans, 28 August). Health campaigners across the country find themselves fighting against an increasing barrage of local NHS cuts and threatened closures, privatisations by stealth and the reconfiguration of services into accountable care organisations, exactly as Hawking describes. The problem is that they are often doing this without the support of their local Labour MPs and in the context of a disturbing silence from Labour nationally, since the election in June, on how it will reverse the Tories’ controlled demolition of the NHS. Millions of people will never forgive the Labour party if it doesn’t have the courage to acknowledge its historic error in opening the door to privatisation of NHS services and to make its commitment to restoring a public NHS unequivocal.
Mavis Zutshi
Bristol
• I was thrilled to read Professor Stephen Hawking’s glowing tribute to our “finest public service”. At 75 years of age and a world-class scientist known by everyone in the country, Professor Hawking is in a perfect position to state his case for the prosecution of the Tories and Jeremy Hunt in particular, for their mendacity over what they say they are doing for the NHS, while undermining it by cuts, underfunding and demoralisation of staff, as well as introducing privatisation for years without proclaiming their real aim, which is to destroy the NHS and replace it with a US-style insurance system controlled by multinational companies.
Many ordinary patients like me have protested to our local MPs over the years about the political decisions the Tories have made to ultimately scrap the NHS, and their relentless pursuit of the drip-drip methods of convincing people that we cannot afford the NHS any more. This is a total lie, and I would like other well-known people who value and cherish the NHS to come out and say so before it’s too late. Nye Bevan said the NHS would exist only as long as people were willing to fight for it. Let’s hear it from the great and the good in support of the treasure in our midst.
Lynda Mannix
East Grinstead, West Sussex
Read more letters on the NHS
• Doctors back Stephen Hawking’s challenge to Jeremy Hunt
• NHS staff feeling drained by endless reorganisation
• Labour ought to speak out about the NHS as strongly as Stephen Hawking
• When waiting for health services can have fatal consequences
• Bloody NHS didn’t even allow me time to read my mag
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