Letters: Is anyone prepared to take ultimate responsibility for the health service?
SIR – Philip Johnston asks: who runs the NHS?
The answer is: no one. The health service has been mythologised to such an extent, and become so untouchable, that nobody dares to take responsibility for it.
The result is that all those who work within or around it, from the Health Secretary downwards, are little more than component parts in an out-of-control automaton, reacting to its erratic movements rather than controlling them.
In these circumstances, throwing more money at the NHS, or recruiting more staff, will not help. The system is doomed to crash.
Jim Doar
Consett, Co Durham
SIR – Philip Johnston is right to point out that one of the big problems facing the NHS is bed-blocking. His suggestion of using Nightingale hospitals is appropriate.
When I recently visited the A&E department of my local hospital, I saw rows of elderly patients on trolleys in corridors. They did not appear to be getting any attention. I wonder why the bed-blockers cannot be put on the trolleys, while those in immediate need go into the wards.
Janet Clarke
Chertsey, Surrey
SIR – I know of five children under the age of five who have recently been taken to A&E with respiratory problems or bugs. All have endured lengthy waits, exposing them to many other ailments.
Not one of these children needed hospital treatment: they needed antibiotics, or the parents needed reassurance. The only reason they suffered this treatment was that their GPs refused to see them. When will something be done about this?
Stuart Gould
Peterborough
SIR – I could not believe it when I heard Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, claim that any pay rises for nurses would “take money away” from front-line NHS services.
Nurses are the front line. Mr Barclay should have been talking about the “second line”: managers, diversity consultants and others. They are overpaid and unnecessary. Nobody would notice if they went on strike.
As Angela de Caux Feather (Letters, December 15) points out, the reason we are 40,000 nurses short is that trainee nurses have to go to university and complete a degree, coming out with large debts and too little practical experience. NHS managers could recruit 10,000 new student nurses next year if the old training system were revived.
But the trouble with the NHS is that it is run by people who know nothing about patient care. Those on the front line deserve better pay and more respect, but it is those in charge of them who get all the money, while reducing the ability of medical staff to provide the care they want to give.
Frank McGinn FRCS
Lymington, Hampshire
Human rights reform
SIR – For human rights lawyers the European Convention on Human Rights (report, December 19) must be a veritable gold mine, and, for their immigrant clients, a proven “open sesame” to a life in Britain.
What is less well-known about the convention is that the rights it purports to protect are inferior to those with which British subjects are born.
For example, it specifically does not embody the equivalent of our law of habeas corpus, which is generally accepted as being the keystone of the British criminal justice system. Consequentially, the convention does not outlaw arbitrary arrest, nor does it prohibit virtually unlimited detention without trial.
The European Court of Human Rights is on record, in the case of Luciano Ferrari-Bravo vs Italy (1984), as ruling that it was “reasonable”, under Article 6 of the Convention, to keep a suspect in prison with no public hearing for five years before trial because “detention is intended to facilitate the preliminary investigation”.
There is no denying the leading role Britain played in formulating the convention after the Second World War, but the world has changed and it is now being used in ways for which it was never intended.
By substituting the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the discredited convention, the Government could end the potential for arbitrary arrest, banish the prospect of virtually unlimited detention without trial, and make British judges sitting in British courts the final arbiters in human rights cases, instead of one of the 47 foreign judges – some from questionable jurisdictions – who inhabit the European Court.
Christopher Gill
Bridgnorth, Shropshire
Elusive cheese biscuits
SIR – It isn’t only Jacob’s Cream Crackers that are missing from shop shelves (Letters, December 21).
We spent several fruitless hours searching local supermarkets for biscuits to accompany our festive cheeseboard. All my favourites – Hovis Crackers, sesame seed, poppy seed and multigrain – were missing. It wasn’t that they were sold out – there weren’t even spaces for them on the shelves. All we could find were “selection boxes” of bland, uninspiring crackers.
What do people eat with their Stinking Bishop nowadays?
Phil Walton
Leeds, West Yorkshire
Lockdown lunacy
SIR – Will our Government, and the majority of the population that supported it at the time, ever admit to the catastrophic error committed by locking the country down for the best part of two years in order to cope with an illness that had a mortality rate of less than 1 per cent?
The predictable consequences include the rampant inflation now ravaging the economy, excess cancer, heart and stroke deaths due to neglect during the pandemic, compromised immune systems leading to high levels of flu, Covid and Strep A infections, and sluggish economic activity caused both by the refusal of staff to return to the office and the lifestyle choice to retire early (report, December 20). Taxes and fuel duty are to be at an all-time high to fill the fiscal “black hole”, leading, no doubt, to the exodus of our brightest and best minds.
In the meantime, union unrest threatens to derail not just Christmas and our fragile economy, but also the health service, which was struggling before the pandemic. Now it is on its knees even without any withdrawal of labour.
If this country is to stand a chance of recovering from its pandemic response, we all have a part to play: everyone must return to work.
Georgina Stanger
Caerwent, Monmouthshire
Cromwell’s legacy
SIR – As a monarchist, I should agree with John Barstow and Michael Varvill (Letters, December 21), who call for the statue of Oliver Cromwell in Parliament Square to be replaced with one of Queen Elizabeth II.
As a student of the living history represented by this United Kingdom and its Parliament, I deplore such cancel culture. Like all men, Cromwell was deeply flawed, but his role in the development of a constitutional monarchy in Britain was important, preventing absolutist royal rule. We learn from our history by acknowledging it, not hiding from it.
Michael Staples
Seaford, East Sussex
Accidental alcohol
SIR – S H Waters’s wife (Letters, December 14), when she was a child, would help herself to her father’s port.
When we were children, my parents bought us a bottle of Stone’s Original Ginger Wine for Christmas dinner. They had no idea it was alcoholic, and nor did I – until, 30 years later, I went on a tour of the factory in Jamaica.
I always look back on childhood Christmases as joyful times. Not surprising, as we children were probably drunk.
Isobel Barker
Torpoint, Cornwall
SIR – I, too, recall my mother preparing a concoction of raw egg and sherry, plus glucose (Letters, December 21). Its purpose was to make me run faster in the town sports event at the age of 10.
Steve Vine
Nottingham
SIR – I would like to thank Avril Wright (Letters, December 20) for her Swiss hangover cure, Mehlsuppe – although it’s remarkably similar to my recipe for chicken gravy.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised – after all, beef consommé is known to be efficacious in these circumstances.
Andrew Woodward
Nongprue, Chonburi, Thailand
SIR – When asked what the cure for a hangover was, my dad replied: “Four o’clock.” You just had to put up with it until it went away of its own accord.
Roger Hogbin
Weymouth, Dorset
The nighttime rituals of our feline friends
SIR – Dogs are not alone in their curious and often entertaining bedtime behaviour (Letters, December 19).
When my late wife and I retired at night, our cat Caspar would follow us upstairs and sit on the window ledge, watching the sea, while we read, did crosswords and sorted out the remains of the day.
When the lights were switched off, he would come to my side of the bed and push his paw up under the duvet to poke my leg. The required response was for me to put my foot on the floor, so he could lie down and rest his head on it for a catnap.
Sufficiently refreshed, he would patter downstairs, crash through his cat-flap and disappear into the night for who knows what mischief.
J A Porter
River, Kent
SIR – Jacky Staff (Letters, December 20), who is worried by her mother’s smart-meter obsession, should get her a kitten.
Within days of its arrival, ours had chewed through the cable of our meter’s monitor, rendering it useless. She is also a furry heat source on any lap.
Jan Phillips
Sutton Coldfield
A card exchange that has stood the test of time
SIR – I am sorry to disappoint Barbara Wicker (Letters, December 20), who thinks her husband and a friend of his hold a record for exchanging the same birthday card since 1979.
My younger brother and I have been exchanging the same (very corny) card since 1961, when I was 13, having appropriated the idea from an uncle.
I diligently cross out his name each year and enter mine. He does the same. As his birthday is in July and mine in August, I have the major responsibility for its care. We have never thought to mistrust Royal Mail with its delivery.
Gordon Slack
Stowmarket, Suffolk
SIR – I have just received the Christmas card that my friend and I have been relaying to one another since 1956, each year with the addition of a topical picture and comment.
There was an earlier card, dating from 1952, but it got lost in the post between Liberia and France in 1966.
John Crates
Lamberhurst, Kent
SIR – I was born in 1954 and a nurse on the maternity ward kept in touch with my parents.
Nurse Irene has sent Christmas cards to my family, and a birthday card to me, every year for the past 68 years.
Ruth L Cleworth
Alnwick, Northumberland
SIR – We’ve just received a Christmas card containing our own names but no one else’s. I don’t think I sent it to myself, but how will I know?
William T Nuttall
Rossendale, Lancashire
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