THE Department of Health want us to believe that the NHS is under pressure because of our ageing population when the government must know that it is due to their savage cuts to social care that mean elderly patients cannot be discharged from their acute-care hospital beds.

The Tories divided the NHS into purchasers and providers in 1990, which not only added about £10 billion annually to administrative costs but also led to public disillusionment with the public service ethos that so many in their party despise when they talk of a ‘smaller state’.

They promised ‘no more top-down reorganisation’ to get elected in 2010 but within six weeks published a White Paper setting out the biggest top-down reorganisation in NHS history, which resulted in the Health and Social Care Bill that cost nearly £3 billion and incalculable amounts of clinical and managerial time.

Competitive tendering proved very expensive and the number of organisations required to run the NHS increased three-fold, creating what The Economist described as ‘a special circle of bureaucratic hell’.

As Raymond Tallis makes clear in his recent book on the NHS – if you want to privatise a much admired pubic service, defunding it is a clever move. This also enabled leading Tory Brexiteers to convince Leave voters that their money, instead going to Brussels bureaucracy would go to an increasingly bureaucratic NHS, which their policies created and deliberately underfunded, and now they haven’t a clue how to secure access to the single market for our exports so vital for our economy.

Our NHS was founded by a Welshman as the crowning achievement of our welfare state and was good value for money until the Tories got their hands on it.

In the absence of any effective opposition at Westminster, the time has come for Wales, as the last bastion of Labour government in the UK, to save the day by joining forces with Scotland and Northern Ireland to challenge and defeat the government’s aim of making us a one party state, through their planned boundary changes, so that they can continue their wanton destruction of our once much admired NHS.

Margaret Phelps

Raisdale Gardens

Penarth