Letters: High price of Osborne's public health cuts

The following letters appear in the 27th November edition of the Independent

Martin Lewis says Chancellor George Osborne 'didn't even have the balls' to mention the reform in his Autumn Statement because he was aware of its unpopularity (Matthew Horwood - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Increased spending on the health service generally, announced by the Chancellor in the Autumn Statement, is very welcome, but the same cannot be said of the 4 per cent reduction in spending on public health. This comes on top of a £200m cut in public health spending in the current year. These cuts are objectionable on two grounds.

First, when the Government said that “We will be able to increase spending in real terms every year” it was assumed that this pledge covered all health. I do not remember ministers saying that public health was in some way exempted from the pledge.

Second, the Chancellor emphasises the importance of long-term investment, and I very much agree with that. Public health is a prime example of where long-term investment can operate to the benefit of both the public and the Exchequer.

If you take HIV as an example, every case prevented means around £300,000 of lifetime costs avoided. In both human and financial terms the gain is immense.

We need to prevent people from contracting HIV and we need to persuade people at risk to come forward for testing. It is estimated that about a quarter of 107,000 people in Britain living with HIV are undiagnosed, with obvious risks to themselves and the public generally. We also need to care for those men and women living with HIV who can still face serious health problems. Yet here the National Aids Trust report that already some cities are withdrawing from all HIV support services .

This is all a bad prelude for World Aids Day next week.

Norman Fowler

Lord Fowler

House of Lords

To maintain profit margins, businesses have to pass on cost increases to customers by way of price increases. Those who buy to let don’t do so for philanthropic reasons, and it is reasonable to assume they will do the same with the stamp duty increases the Chancellor announced, by raising rents.

Overall, the Government wins, but can we spare a thought for the inevitable losers, the tenants?

Alan Simpson

Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire

George Osborne has a duty to publish the incantations he used to produce £27bn from his hat. I don’t need that much, but it would help a lot to find a few thousand down the back of the sofa.

John Day

Portchester, Hampshire

A warning from the little red book

Tom Peck has got it wrong over the Chinese red book (Sketch, 26 November). The Shadow Chancellor used that to point how wrong it was for George Osborne to grovel to this Communist regime, with the country flooded with low-quality Chinese goods. Even more worrying is the involvement of the Chinese to build an unproven nuclear power station with a French nationalised company.

Back in the 1980s the Conservatives were telling us that Japanese was the way forward and gave massive subsidies to Japanese companies to come to the UK. Why is it that the Conservatives have such a low opinion of the British workforce. If they only paid a tenth of the attention to British industry that they give to foreign companies we would be better off.

P Morrison

Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

For a moment put aside the Little Red Book and concentrate on the real political issue. Do we think it is in Britain’s best interest that swathes of our national infrastructure should be sold to foreign investors, be they companies or countries?

Already we cannot plan for economic growth as we might wish because foreign multinationals own much of our business and industry, and, as we have discovered with our steel plants, the Government cannot stop them when they choose to walk away, leaving behind a trail of economic and social devastation.

Our nuclear power industry is being upgraded with Chinese funding, but at what cost to our independence and security? Just imagine the possibilities for economic or political blackmail if George Osborne sells air traffic control to one of his new friends!

Whether or not the Little Red Book aside was a good idea, John McDonnell was absolutely right to castigate the Tories for their plans to further sell off of our essential infrastructure.

Margaret Parker

Meltham, West Yorkshire

You can’t bomb Isis into surrender

The Nazi regime survived in all its vicious brutality two years of the most relentless Allied bombing of German cities and other targets. It finally collapsed under the onslaught of the huge Russian forces and the subsequent invasion by the Western Allies.

To believe that a fierce bombing campaign will destroy or sanitise, rather than inflame even further, the fanatical and evasive forces we unleashed when we attacked and bombed Iraq and Libya shows a frightening ignorance among our elected representatives.

I find it sad that these politicians, together with almost the entire British press, should spend so much time, energy and venom attacking Jeremy Corbyn, one of the few public voices with an intelligent understanding of the dangerous complexities of the contemporary Middle East.

Carla M Wartenberg

London NW3

Steve Richards’ superb analysis of David Cameron’s dreadful attempt of emotional blackmail on Parliament by suggesting the comparison of this being a “Churchill or Chamberlain” moment (24 November), will I hope be heard by MPs who have still to make their decision. When the bombs have dropped, what then?

The point that I think needs addressing is when are we in the West going to face up to “militant Islam”? I believe that the core of this malignant Islam is from Saudi Arabia: 9/11, al-Qa’eda, Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Sharab, including “Daesh”, and now the new bunch in Mali all stem from the Wahhabi sect of Islam financed and based in Saudi.

The royal family, absolute rulers, acquiesce in, if they don’t actually drive and finance, this worldwide terrorist activity. They need to be detached from the mullahs by determined efforts from the West and the rest of those who follow peaceful Islam. That would be Cameron’s Churchill moment.

I suppose he wonders where he would sell all our arms.

Peter Downey

Bath

Why don’t Cameron, and (I cannot believe I am writing this) those Labour MPs who want to commit Britain to yet another futile war in the Middle East, read Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk, so that they can perhaps make a more measured and informed response to the situation?

The hyperbole and the rhetoric of all those who wish to “bomb” Isis smacks of a very unnerving lack of understanding of the region, and a blithe disregard for events in recent history.

Lin Hawkins

Ashcott, Somerset

Rosalind Franklin remembered

In your piece on Nicole Kidman’s Best Actress award for Photograph 51 (23 November) you are in danger of perpetuating one myth as you seek to explode another.

While it is undoubtedly true that Rosalind Franklin was the victim of some pretty shoddy and sexist behaviour by some at Cambridge University and Kings College London, it is stretching a point to describe her as having been written out of history. She may have received less credit than she deserved for it but I believe that her contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA has been widely known for a long time now.

Franklin pursued a successful career in science at a time when it certainly was not easy for women to do so. But for her untimely death she might well have won a Nobel prize herself. She is, rightly, commemorated by a large number of scientific awards, laboratories, buildings and even a university named in her honour and in recognition of her contribution to science – hardly the fate of someone who has been written out of history.

Jonathan Wallace

Newcastle upon Tyne

Religion and conflict

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s puzzlement about the Paris attacks is odd. The immediate cause of terrorist atrocities and similar crimes, whether from a religious or a non-religious perspective, is human evil. It’s natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis and so on) for which theists must struggle to find an explanation.

Tim Hudson

Chichester

The Reverend Kim Fabricius includes “aggressive secularism” in his critique of “Western liberal society” (letter, 24 November). Given that much of the bloodshed in the Middle East, and indeed Europe, has been a result of people fighting each other about which imaginary Bronze Age sky-god of Vengeance and Retribution is the “true” god, then surely a bit of aggressive secularism is no bad thing!

Simon Francis Stevens

Crawley, Hampshire