When the sustained underfunding and under-resourcing of the NHS starts to impact on our children’s health, it is time to say enough is enough (Hospitals cancel 12,000 children’s operations in a year, NHS admits, 6 June). The tens of thousands of children’s operations cancelled over the past four years reveal the true picture of an NHS at breaking point, buckling under the increasing pressure felt across the service. Our hospitals and GP surgeries are full, social care is collapsing, NHS staff are working under impossible conditions and patients – of all ages – are being let down. Politicians of all parties cannot duck this crisis any longer. We need credible plans that will deliver the fully funded and supported NHS that staff want and patients deserve.
Dr Mark Porter
Council chair, British Medical Association
• Theresa May says (Report, 4 June) “we need to live our lives not in a series of separated and segregated communities”. Will she now renounce her support for faith schools and the proposal announced last September to allow them to exclude anyone of a different religion or belief, instead of the present 50% cap?
Paul Kaufman
Chair, East London Humanists
• With regard to the prime minister’s defence for non-participation in the leaders’ debates, I am reminded of what my gran would say if our pleas didn’t align with her plans: “I hear ye, but I’m no’ heeding ye.”
Michael Muirhead
Edinburgh
• The leap from strong and stable to weak and wobbly was appropriate, but after her evasions on tax, may I suggest sly and slippery?
Murray White
Cambridge
• Your subhead on Gary Younge’s piece (6 June) was “His critics wrote him [Corbyn] off with the certainty of scientists”. But it is sheer uncertainty that is the stuff of a scientist’s life; our challenge and satisfaction is just to reduce it. Scientists who consider that they have achieved certainty are called engineers.
Professor Kit Hill
Professor of physics emeritus, Institute of Cancer Research
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