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Low opinion of politicos

IS it any wonder that young people are voting for the terrorists’ friend Jeremy Corbyn?

Little chance of being able to buy a house without a hefty deposit.

Saddled with debt for university tuition when not one of the people who brought it in paid a penny for their education at university.

Hypocrites isn’t the word for it.

Zero-hour contracts, the last time I saw that game played was in the 1954 film, On the Waterfront.

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Gangsters were responsible for that regarding the New York dockers workforce in the film. Sixty-four years later they are still getting away with it in modern Britain.

The latest one to come to light through a free press, thank the Lord so far, unless Jeremy wins power, is the absolute scandal of taxpayers subsiding the House of Lords food and drinks bill to the tune of £8,000 per day.

A bunch of freeloaders who did their utmost to thwart the will of the people regarding Brexit.

The largest vote cast in this island’s history.

You and I are feeding them and they earn £300 a day for turning up!

When most people their age this winter will have a choice of heat or meat, but cannot afford both.When people are queuing up at food banks.

Not to mention Theresa Maybe doing an impression of Neville Chamberlain in drag.

He sold us down the river to the Third Reich.

She is selling this great country down the river to a load of European unelected, jumped-up foreign bullies ruled by the Fourth Reich.

I personally have never held such a low opinion of the political classes in my lifetime, as I have at the moment. I strongly suspect I am not alone regarding that last statement,

Bill Williams, Merlin Way, Covingham

Fiasco is no surprise

The reported patient fury at GP phone line fiasco (SA 3 Oct) should come as no surprise to your readers as it is a predictable outcome of the decision of the doctors to sell the five surgeries to a company whose main aim is to make a profit from what is a business.

The feeble comment from Integrated Medical Holdings (IMH) that they have had ‘teething problems’ ignores the fact they made long-serving and knowledgeable staff redundant following their acquisitions.

What is interesting is the silence of the clinicians who sold their practices to IMH.

Not that long ago some of them would have been very vocal in blaming funding shortages by the government for an inability to provide the care they so wanted to give.

Now that they have pocketed the cash and in some cases secured comfortable salaried positions working for IMH, it seems their virtue signalling days are over.

In 1948 at the birth of the NHS, General Practice was and always has been a privately run business and self-employed doctors fought hard and long for the right to remain ‘outside’ the new state run NHS and run their own affairs.

Nothing has changed with the ‘new regimes’ other than the smaller practices have been subsumed into a larger group.

Of course there will be synergies which rightly should be examined and, where appropriate, commercially developed; call centres are a case in point.

Sadly, the era of the family doctor who knew every patient and could claim to have tended multi generations of the same family is over, and has been for many years.

Des Morgan, Caraway Drive, Swindon

No joined-up thinking

At a recent visit to Swindon’s GWH A & E, where I was suffering from chest pains, I can only say the reception, the level of care, efficiency and diagnosis was outstanding and quite remarkable.

I intended to compliment them publicly at the time but I hope this retrospective accolade will suffice.

Further events of the last week or so however have highlighted just how much the rest of the local health service is doing to make the A & E job inherently more difficult.

You described the tragedy of a woman’s death where the family believe an hour’s wait for an ambulance was a contributory factor. It seems almost all crews were on an evening break together on a Saturday night, hugely complicating the A & E task when eventually she did arrive.

Of lesser import, but following an accident when a rusty, earth clad nail, fairly deeply pierced my foot, I tried to use the splendid new walk-in centre on Fleming Way.

It was 7pm and it was closed.

I then rang 101 and was told to drive to Cirencester which I did and waited three hours until 10pm, to be eventually told they have no tetanus vaccine as ”there is a shortage”.

Separately in the interest of so-called ‘efficiency’, this week a CAPITA like company from Manchester took control of my local GP practice and as you have so accurately reported on these pages, made a colossal mess of it.

The litany of errors are schoolboy stuff and how any professional company could set out with such an appalling disregard to planning is entirely beyond me.

The lack of competence, understanding and preparedness is frightening and would be comic (please hold you are number 106 in the queue!) if it wasn’t so serious.

Fortunately it seems most of this is just “teething troubles” … that’s all right then!

Few people visit GWH simply for the pleasant country drive. Mostly they are concerned parents or frightened patients in need of treatment, care or reassurance.

Everyone talks about relieving pressure on A & E but decisions like these, together with the blatant lack of any joined-up thinking, achieve precisely the opposite.

John Stooke, Haydon End, Havisham Drive, Swindon