The pouring rain last Saturday made no difference. Thousands of us marched through the streets of Grantham anyway, defiantly protesting against United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust’s outrageous decision to close Grantham Hospital’s Accident and Emergency ward. It was a wonderful sight.
Nick Boles MP was there. I wonder how he felt, knowing, as he surely must, that it’s his party that’s mostly responsible - responsible for not only this attack on Grantham hospital, but identical attacks on A&E departments up and down the country.
If it’s possible to do anything more shameful than attack a hospital, it’s to attack its most vital function - its accident and emergency service.
When Mr Boles spoke he said we should write letters; we should write to him, he said, and write to Jeremy Hunt, say we’re not happy.
All will be well if we write lots of letters.
Well you’re wrong Mr Boles. The time for letter-writing to MPs is over.
I’ve written dozens of letters to MPs, to Prime Ministers too, even the Royals - on dozens of subjects - from their butchery of our public services, to their facilitation of white-collar crime, to their active support of illegal wars.
To their credit, they or their flunkeys invariably answer - but you can almost see the conceited smugness in the replies, the “you can write to me all you like, but it ain’t going to make a scrap of difference” attitude.
The time for writing to MPs is over. There’s only one action left to take: the ballot box. Most of these people must be voted out of office.
The wonderful public services we once had, not that very long go - the free university educations, the good and plentiful council housing, full employment, the decent retirement pensions available at age sixty, the wonderful world-class NHS were all originally provided by socialists.
Then came Thatcher. For the last four decades capitalists have been slowly but surely destroying all of the socialists’ wonderful work with their cynical death-by-a-thousand-cuts tactic. They’ve butchered our wonderful public services so trans-national corporations and investment banks can loot the profits.
The time for writing to MPs is over. The most effective answer to A&E closures, and all the other scandalous attacks on our precious public services, is very simple: stop voting for capitalists; start voting for socialists.
You can have capitalists or public services; you can’t have both.
John Andrews
Marratts Lane
Great Gonerby