Why doesn’t Matt Hancock do the decent thing?

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Why don’t the people in his constituency get enough signatures to invoke a by-election? (Getty Images)

I have already expressed my opinion about Matt Hancock taking part in this year’s I’m A Celebrity. But once again, he has managed to leave me almost lost for words.

He has decided not to stand for parliament at the next election – getting his announcement in just before he was sacked. So why doesn’t he do the decent thing and resign now? Oh, I forgot – if he did that, he would have to stop drawing a salary of over £80,000 as an MP.

Why don’t the people in his constituency get enough signatures to force a by-election now?

John R Chappell

Huddersfield

Constituents first

So Matt Hancock has had a road to Damascus moment, has he? Where has he been all this time in parliament?

Obviously, the Tory party machine doesn’t permit the free-thinking it espouses. If he thinks he can reach out to those who see politics and the whole world thereof in new and different ways, good luck to him. Until the entire system does what it says on the gov.uk websites of those aspiring to be members of parliament, then nothing will change.

Constituents first, country second, party third. Perhaps someone in the party machine will read this and say it’s a new idea.

John Stockwell

Ware, Hertfordshire

No wonder the NHS isn’t working

Is anyone surprised that the NHS is in total meltdown? This is not a surprise. It has been clear since the Cameron/Osborne double act started their squeeze of funding for the NHS that the tactic of consecutive Conservative governments has been to starve it to death.

Then they could say, quite rightly in their view, that the NHS isn’t working. But what luck! Here is a bunch of our cronies and donors, who just happen to own private healthcare companies. They’ve come to save the day.

So the Tories get what they have wanted for years. An American-style healthcare system that is known to be brutally unfair, leaving those with little income with no healthcare at all. The writing has been on the wall for years.

Karen Brittain

York

In whose interests?

Just a month or so ago, Tory politicians were telling us that they would only allow fracking where there was local consent. I didn’t believe them then and I don’t believe them now when they tell us they will only allow onshore wind farms “with local consent”.

Adding ancient monuments, sites of special scientific Interest and productive agricultural land to the list of places where wind farms will not be allowed might give some assurance. Given that the government has just given permission for the first new coal mine in decades, however, are we totally sure that we can rely on them to put the interests of the country (not to mention the planet) before the interests of their corporate donors?

Helen Bore

Scarborough

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Transparency in spending

If at least one thing is clear from the Covid contracts debacle, it is that the UK government is able to part with hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money while the taxpayer has no idea who the recipients of our “generosity” are.

It seems to me it would be quite simple for the government to set up a public register that transparently accounted for the sums of taxpayers’ money spent, the value received by the taxpayer, and the names of the domestic and foreign individuals and organisations who have benefitted.

Clearly, this will never happen under the Tories because it would expose them as a party whose main function is to transfer the maximum amount of taxpayers’ money to the private sector for the minimum amount of value received.

Dr Kevin Murphy

Southampton