Health tourists must pay
Sir: The extent of the use made by non-entitled patients from abroad (‘International Health Service’, 6 April) should come as no surprise. This increasing stream of information demonstrating the volume and variation will cause even louder gasps and shock.
The NHS is the standard-bearer of the politics of equality and, like all great collective institutions of the left, however altruistic, is fundamentally corrupt. The corruption is so insidious that only those inside gain insight after the collapse.
In the health service there are often concealed two or more levels of care with varying degrees of competence. When the ‘health tourist’ is forced into paying, they will seek out ‘the best’, which will now be found in the swelling private sector, leaving the NHS depleted, and open to increasing scrutiny by the public. What was once invisible now becomes visible.
Anthony Mitra FRCS
(Hospital consultant, retired)
By email
Wrong about the weather
Sir: Matt Ridley (Diary, 6 April) bemoans the Met Office’s lack of success in longer-term forecasting and puts the blame on a computer algorithm predicated on an assumption of global warming. I’d like to offer an alternative theory. Could it be that the Met Office has changed its recruitment policy to favour economists?
Brendan Keelan
London SW1
Affordable opera
Sir: Steerpike (6 April) claims that a couple of cheap seats for the current Royal Opera production of Die Zauberflöte would set Iain Duncan Smith back £220. Not so — he could have had two for as little as £6 each. While it would be of little relevance to a man on such a tight budget, there are over 300 seats priced at £20 or less for the performances referred to by Steerpike, and over 950 priced at £50 or less. Were he willing to join those who choose to stand, Mr Duncan Smith would find another 124 places, all for under a tenner.
Michael Brind
Woking, Surrey
Rock’s fall
Sir: Patrick Rock made a powerful contribution to his own defeat at the Portsmouth South by-election in 1984 (Politics, 30 March). In a radio discussion he managed to get the name of the constituency wrong and claimed credit for a hospital that had not been built. Rock is an extraordinary combination of the naive and the astute (as regards political tactics, not strategy). The last time I saw him he was wandering down Whitehall on the day of a civil service strike, his back covered in stickers proclaiming the merits of the strike. He is blessed with great redeeming charm.
Lord Lexden
London SWI
Council blunders
Sir: I read Harry Mount’s article ‘The home wreckers’ (30 March) with sympathy, but am surprised he places the blame on Russian oligarchs. Surely the planning departments of the borough councils, in this case the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, are responsible? The likes of Mr Abramovich would be unable to cause such damage if they had not been given permission. Cheyne Walk is far from being the only case in point. We have been horrified at the RBKC’s alacrity in sacrificing the one remaining original entrance to the Hillgate Village, mainly for budgetary reasons, I am told. The project will largely obliterate the view of — and from — the old stationmaster’s house on its threshold, which introduces the whole atmosphere of this charming hidden corner of London. Forget about knocking three terrace houses into one: here, two streets are to be joined together by a vile juggernaut of a building.
I see that councils need money. But as Harry Mount writes, this myopic approach will end by ruining London’s most picturesque districts. Who was it who said that planners have destroyed more of London than the Luftwaffe?
Odile Taliani
Vienna, Austria
Sir: ‘Toffs lived in terraced houses like everyone else,’ Harry Mount reminds us. Yes: I recall Julian Amery, when he was a housing minister in Ted Heath’s government, saying during a debate in the Commons: ‘There is nothing wrong with living in a terraced house. I have lived in one all my life.’ His house was in Eaton Square and its outstanding feature was a splendid dark green library.
David Woodhead
Leatherhead, Surrey
Where to find houses
Sir: Alan Doyle (Letters, 30 March) tells us that ‘Britain is, of course, a small island.’ There are in fact only eight larger islands on earth: we live on a large island. And the solution to the housing shortage is even simpler than the interest-rate adjustment he understandably recommends from his home in Sunbury-on-Thames. Here in Liverpool, he can buy a nice house for about £60,000 and find entire streets boarded up. There is no ‘relentless upward pressure on house prices’. The market would be balanced if a way could be found to distribute jobs away from the Home Counties.
Ken Bishop
Liverpool
Northern lights
Sir: I enjoyed Basil Ransome-Davies’ witty poem in praise of Canada (6 April), but Susan Sarandon was in fact born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City. May I suggest that Marshall McLuhan take her place? He predicted the world wide web
30 years before it was invented.
John O’Byrne
Dublin
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