If we want the NHS to survive, we need to spend more

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

I have nothing but praise for all the staff in the hospital. But I could see the stresses and strains they were under (PA Wire)

I’ve just been discharged from hospital having spent eight days there being treated for pneumonia. One hundred years ago I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this as I would have died (without antibiotics). Seventy-six years ago (pre-NHS) I might have died because the treatment could not be afforded. I know how lucky I am.

I have nothing but praise for all the staff in the hospital. But I could see the stresses and strains they were under. This is particularly the case on the night shift when there seemed to be one senior and three junior nurses to look after the ward. There are consequences for the number of unfilled posts and the low pay. I’m pretty certain that the health secretary (or any of his predecessors) has never done a nightshift alongside these wonderful people who sometimes deal with very difficult situations with minimal backup. So, whatever he thinks he knows about the health service, he only has a very superficial understanding – probably good enough for the round of TV interviews.

I never clapped for carers during Covid because I knew it was just a political stunt. What the NHS needs is proper funding; a proper workforce plan. At some point we need to face up to reality. If we want the NHS to survive, we need to spend more.

Andrew Baker

Nottingham

Energy takeaway

I always knew that oil and gas production and supply was a complicated issue governed in the main by private companies and largely authoritarian states. However, it still seems we in the UK have managed our own resources extremely badly.

We squandered the income from North Sea oil and gas, preferring under Margaret Thatcher to use it for tax cuts, unlike our Norwegian neighbours who benefit from a large sovereign wealth fund. When the war in Ukraine affected supplies to the West, we were told we were in danger of running out of gas. Now I read in Andrew Grice’s column that we actually export 81 per cent of our oil and 61 per cent of our gas.

Something doesn’t add up. Maybe the answer lies in insisting that the energy from the North Sea under current and certainly future licenses is sold to the UK at the price we want to pay for it, in order to satisfy home demand as we gradually wean ourselves off these products.

Geoff Forward

Stirling

The cruelty is the point

When in your leader article you plaintively suggest it can’t be the government’s aim just to cause trouble with their eviction policy for Afghani refugees, I think you are being rather naive. The cruelty is the entire point of this exercise.

The people who advise the Tory party on how to win elections have identified immigration as one of the two key wedge issues that may give them a narrow path to victory (along with climate denialism).

The problem they face is that their immigration policy is an incompetently managed shambles. As such they find that they need, in place of a coherent set of measures, to use their media wing to portray every immigrant as somehow less than human, a danger to our country and to “our values”. Then come up with a feast of initiatives, all more bizarre than the last, but with systemic cruelty inbuilt and ratcheted up each time, and internal enemies, judges, lawyers, the “blob”, the “left” etc, who are bent on stopping you and hope that this convinces enough people to vote for you.

As the election gets nearer, and public services, the economy – the things the public really care about – fail to improve, the ingrained ineptitude of our rulers becomes more and more apparent. Expect the cruelty to increase, the rhetoric from Tory politicians and their media cronies to get more hateful, and for everything to become darker.

Let’s hope it’s the dark before dawn, and we get a government which has humanity, compassion, tolerance and common sense at the heart of their mission, and we have an immigration system that works for the country, and that we no longer have to feel ashamed about.

John Murray

Bracknell

Be prepared?

You report that the Scout jamboree attended by 60,000 in South Korea has descended into disarray due to various problems, some foreseen, others not, resulting in thousands of UK attendees leaving early [for a hotel in Seoul]. Remind me of the Scouts’ motto again? Oh, that’s right: “Be prepared.”

Colin Burke

Cumbria