Our vanishing hospitals
In 1909 my great-grandfather C.H.E. Croydon built and gave the Croydon Cottage Hospital to the people of Felixstowe. It consisted of ten beds and the population at that time was roughly 1,840. We now find that, with a population of nearly 33,000 and ever more need for hospital beds, it faces the possibility of closure (‘Fear in the community’, 17 September).
The Bartlett Hospital, also in Felixstowe, is to close; this has already been decided by the PCT. They say that to have two hospitals in Felixstowe is unsustainable because of the large deficit position they are in. But when the buildings are sold and the money is gone, what will happen when ‘changing for the better’ proves to be a disaster and people’s lives are put at risk? At present, it is impossible to find a private carer, let alone an NHS one. Where are they going to find staff to work for them?
I live in Aldeburgh, where another community hospital has had its beds cut from 32 to 20. The majority of people there are over 65 and though in general they are a very healthy, fit bunch of people, they need their hospital. It is a good 25 miles to Ipswich. Both hospitals have an excellent League of Friends and many thousands of pounds have been spent on these two hospitals.
The Primary Care Trust has been in existence for over four years and, as far as I can see, it has been a complete disaster. The health service in Suffolk has a debt of £74.3 million. How can anyone get into so much debt without realising it? If this happened in the private sector, people would have been sacked.
Gill Ib
Aldeburgh, Suffolk
Re community hospital closures, I would warn Rye Hospital not to think that they are safe just because they have raised money to keep their hospital. The people of Tetbury raised £1.5 million to save their hospital from closure on the understanding that the NHS would contract services out from them. For 14 years we have run the hospital, spent a further £400,000 on new capital projects, and over the last five years have raised an average of £100,000 a year to subsidise running costs to the benefit of the NHS.
In August our local PCT reneged on its contract and informed us that it was withdrawing support for our in-patient beds with effect from 31 December, thereby reducing our income by 55 per cent and condemning our sick and elderly to be referred to other hospitals, which are unreachable by rural transport.
Some ‘patient-led NHS’!
Simon Preston
Chairman, Tetbury Hospital Trust,
Gloucestershire
Ross Clark regrettably neglects to mention an important benefit afforded by local hospitals, viz. they limit the spread of infection. We are now in an unfortunate situation where antibiotics are becoming less effective at treating disease, and bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to medication.
The result of this is that new superbugs will emerge. The worst possible scenario when this happens is that all local hospitals will have been closed down, and large areas will be served by district general hospitals.
William Kelley
London NW3
Firing on ambulances
Rod Liddle (‘Why do we tolerate intolerance?’, 17 September) writes that he has ‘heard no reports of Christian or Jewish combatants firing on Red Crescent vehicles’. He might read the Israeli press for enlightenment, or the Red Crescent website. In 2002 Ha’aretz quoted the director of Israeli Physicians for Human Rights saying that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ‘fires at Palestinian ambulances systematically and as a matter of policy’.
According to the Red Crescent itself, from 2000 to 2005, 341 Red Crescent ambulances have been fired on by the IDF, with 203 staff injured. Dr Khalil Suleiman was killed inside an ambulance while trying to evacuate an injured girl from Jenin refugee camp in March 2002. The ambulance was attacked not only by IDF machine-gun fire but also by a grenade launched at the windscreen. Seen by residents to be screaming through the flames, a second ambulance tried to rescue Dr Suleiman but was also fired on by the army. Every Red Crescent worker I have talked to in the Occupied Territories is aware that Red Crescent markings on their uniform and vehicles give no protection from the IDF.
I fully agree with Mr Liddle that it would be hugely damaging to abolish Holocaust Memorial Day. But let’s not pretend that Muslims have a monopoly on the violations of international humanitarian law to which he refers. That is quite wrong.
Emma Williams
Tynron, Dumfriesshire
Still royal, still ducal
Contrary to press speculation (The Spectator’s Notes, 17 September) the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award has no plans to change its name or remove reference to its royal heritage. There has never been, and never will be, any intention of moving from the royal patronage we enjoy. Similarly we have no intention to rebrand the organisation. Our logo and corporate style will remain the same.
As the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award nears its 50th anniversary year, we plan to use every opportunity to celebrate the tremendous achievements of the Duke and the organisation he founded and nurtured. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award will also build on its capacity to reach many more young people with the award programme.
Peter Westgarth
Chief executive, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award,
Windsor, Berkshire
Beholden to Mayor Ken
David Williams (Letters, 17 September) pointed out that David Cameron’s mayor-appointed police chiefs would allow Ken Livingstone to appoint the Commissioner of the Met. Insane indeed.
Yet that insanity arrived with Labour’s creation of a London mayor eight years ago. The mayor personally appoints just over half of the members of the Metropolitan Police Authority. That authority produces the short list for the job of commissioner. Worse, Livingstone has a direct role in the appointment, discipline and removal of all senior police officers. No wonder London’s senior policemen appear to be politicised: they constantly have to look over their shoulders at City Hall.
How come news of this has not yet reached David Cameron?
Lindsay Jenkins
London W14
What’s wrong with an elected mayor appointing police chiefs? Crime has fallen in New York over the past decade precisely because former mayor Rudy Giuliani — directly accountable to voters — was able to appoint city police chiefs determined to implement zero-tolerance policing. Compare the determination of democratically accountable US police forces to fight crime to the British constabularies’ obsession with politically correct policing.
If Mayor Livingstone were put in charge of London’s police in place of the monumentally useless Metropolitan Police Authority, and he were to prove inept, he would swiftly be sacked by his employers, the people of London.
Direct local accountability over policing is one of the better ideas to have been generated during the current Conservative leadership contest. I suspect that the winner could well be the candidate with the vision to extend the same principle to other public services as well.
Douglas Carswell MP
House of Commons, London SW1
Restoration dramas
Sarah Walden gives no indication of why or on what grounds an unnamed trustee of the National Gallery reproached her for recently publishing letters received from the late Sir Ernst Gombrich between 1982 and 1992 (Arts, 17 September). Her comments on the gallery’s notoriously controversial picture-cleaning policies are well enough founded — and Gombrich was indeed scathing about the gallery’s institutional hauteur. (In 1998 he wrote to me, ‘I believe it was Francis Bacon who said that “knowledge is power”. I had to learn the hard way that power can also masquerade as knowledge, and since th
ere are very few people able to judge these issues, they very easily get away with it.’)
But Mrs Walden’s swipe at the gallery’s present director, Charles Saumarez Smith, seems unfair. The gallery this year, for the first time, held an open debate on the subject of restoration at which critics like myself (though, curiously, not Sarah Walden, who seems also to have attended) put questions publicly to members of the gallery’s conservation staff.
In similar spirit, Mr Saumarez Smith has given my organisation, ArtWatch UK, permission to examine the conservation dossiers of a number of controversially restored paintings.
Michael Daley
East Barnet,
Hertfordshire
Boat mystery deepens
I am fortunate that my wife forwards her copy of The Spectator to me in Baghdad to provide some hours of pleasure amid the dismal sandstorms and bombs. In the 10 September edition my eye caught Trevor Grove’s Diary and the name of his recently acquired boat. He was puzzled by the name, Deglet Nour, which he assumes was taken from the label of a date box; but there is a more romantic possibility. The name in Arabic means Tigris Light (albeit in an Egyptian accent) and one can perhaps picture this vessel in pre-1958 Iraq cutting around the Mesopotamian marshes before the boring Baathists and insufferable Saddam changed the cultural contours of this ancient country.
Alastair Campbell
Defence attaché, British Embassy, Baghdad
Blair’s sporting life
I trust that Peter Oborne is aware that Fettes is a rugby school (Politics, 17 September). It is not only Mr Blair’s cricket background that has been suppressed by No. 10.
Ashley Duthie
Norfolk
What a wonderful article on the truly classless joy of cricket and Blair’s populist espousal of football. I noticed, however, that Mr Oborne did not mention the fact that the victorious Ashes-winning side were invited to take tea at No. 10 last week. Maybe the Prime Minister has finally caught on.
Paul Rogers
Limassol, Cyprus
When author turns critic
I can match Graham Lord’s experience at the hands of Trevor Grove (Letters, 17 September). When my book about Laurie Lee appeared (not authorised, but accepted by his executors, and well received by distinguished critics such as P.J. Kavanagh and Alan Ross) the late Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review carried a disparaging review by Valerie Grove, author of a then unpublished biography of Lee. Incidentally, I had met socially and interviewed Laurie Lee before he died; she had not. I wrote to Auberon Waugh suggesting that I should, quid pro quo, review her book. He did not reply.
Barbara Hooper
Bisley, Gloucestershire
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