Will the government protect the NHS from billionaires like it did football?

A very interesting and informative letter from Sasha Simic on Thursday. 

It was great to see football fans successfully campaign against the self-centred motivated takeover by global billionaires, often from America.

Wouldn’t it be great to see similar action against billionaires’ incursions into our NHS and Insurance Businesses? We’ve already seen Americans take over other areas of society, with prices rising and service levels falling as in the UK funeral business, where prices have increased and the personal touch has disappeared.

Hedley Baldwin

Basingstoke

I see that Downing Street has decided to launch an internal inquiry into the leak of “private” text messages between Boris Johnson and James Dyson. I wish them luck. Identifying someone in Johnson’s inner circle with both principles and honour will be no mean feat.


Julian Self

Milton Keynes

I am very concerned about keeping my family safe if Scotland votes for independence, either in the near or distant future.

Two sure outcomes from this are the removal of Trident, our last and vital line of defence, and secondly a weak and largely undefended border on our beautiful island, that is wide open to the North Sea and our enemies.

When our lives have already been threatened by chemical weapons used on our very own soil, numerous cyber and ransom attacks, terrorism, and threats of escalation from nations such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, are we willing to sit aside and watch independence happen?

Luke Pollard

Sittingbourne

I’m Scottish born and now living in England I feel passionate about the issue of Scottish independence. Certainly, Scotland has a proud and distinctive heritage, but this would not save the country from the disastrous consequences of an SNP majority in the forthcoming election. The likelihood of an independent Scotland would seriously impact the country economically, and put the defence of the nation at risk.

In economic terms, there would be loss of the British block grant, the loss of British naval shipbuilding for their yards with a resulting loss of employment, as two examples. And this under the shadow of the decline in the economic contribution from the North Sea oil industry, to name but one. Nicola Sturgeon does not admit the non-existence of an economic case for a viable independent Scotland.

The implications for the defence of these islands would be profound. The security of our northern borders would be questionable. The expulsion of our nuclear submarines from Faslane would put at risk our nuclear deterrent, as well as resulting in loss of jobs. So an impoverished Scotland would be turning for support to states which are far from having our good at heart. This is graphically illustrated by the hideous Novichok attack here in Salisbury three years ago.

Ian Steedman

Salisbury

We celebrate a helicopter on Mars while some cry over shooters killing on Earth. As US lawmakers rush to tighten gun laws, isn’t it time to bring Nasa technology to our classrooms with video cameras? Never to “bird-dog” teachers and the students’ privacy, but to stop and replay when a critical incident is reported by a teacher, student, or parent. As a 68-year-old substitute teacher in a “high needs” middle school, I believe video evidence would be priceless.

Mike Sawyer

Denver

Any attempt to justify Johnson’s texts to Dyson, or any other aspect of the Tory sleaze surrounding the acquisition of ventilators or PPE on the grounds of an “unprecedented” emergency, fails to take one simple fact into account. The government had been warned about the likelihood of a pandemic, but its ideologically driven and wholly unnecessary commitment to “austerity” had allowed stocks of PPE to be run down and inadequate stocks of ventilators to be bought. The NHS should have had adequate supplies of both without the need for chummy texts to Dyson.

D. Maughan Brown

York

The climate change crisis must be even worse than we feared if Ireland's transport and climate minister Eamon Ryan expects to take a "sun holiday" in Ireland this year.

Liam Power

Dundalk

Last year I responded to the call-up of retired doctors for the pandemic and have worked from home, in a role involving triage. Within two days of my contract arriving, I got emails that my training was out of date in six non-clinical areas, including conflicts of interest. What a shame that members of the current government either don't have to do such training, or don't appear to get the message.

Dr Audrey Boucher

Basingstoke

It may be a naive question, but how on earth could converting a room in Downing Street conceivably have cost £2.6m? It would at least be interesting to see a breakdown of the costs.

It could not only have been been on building materials, lighting rigs, or (admittedly) probably quite an expensive audio-visual kit, could it?

Should one suspect that this is yet another example of the quite staggering amounts that private consultants get away with charging government across all departments on IT, finance, PR, security, HR, and general management consultancy?

Any retired civil servant can point to several IT and other projects that went disastrously wrong – with expensive consult assistance – and were then abandoned. Is this new Boris Johnson vanity project (along with Allegra Stratton) to be abandoned as well? One hopes the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office will have something to say about it.

The results are hideous anyway, and will hardly enhance our reputation for design in the eyes of viewers abroad. Should senior civil servants not have pointed out that if the facility were to justify its costs over a longer period, it should at least have had a politically neutral colour scheme, not the blatant Tory blue of the current administration shrieking at us? What was wrong with the sober environment – with no doubt a few modest technical improvements – of the recently prominent Covid briefing room?

Gavin Turner

Norfolk

India's hospitals are grappling to get oxygen for Covid-19 patients. This is a horrendous collapse of the system. There was already a shortage of vaccine, beds, ventilators, ICU units, medicines in some hospitals. The lives of patients are hanging by a thread. How is a large economy like India short of medical oxygen? All usage of oxygen for industrial purposes should be suspended immediately and it should be modified and diverted to the hospitals. Somebody in the government has to take this decision.

Poor allocation, distribution and logistics have led to these oxygen shortages in Delhi, Maharashtra Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, meanwhile, Kerala has surplus oxygen.

Instead of using trucks and trains to transport oxygen, India should be flying the cylinders in aeroplanes and military aircraft. This shortage of oxygen should have been predicted and provided for. Let’s hope the government is preparing for the various future scenarios of Covid-19’s spread now.

Rajendra Aneja

Mumbai