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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 31 October 2008

Public health service cannot coexist with commercialism

• IT was refreshing to read of Sir Robert Naylor’s opposition to privatisation of the health service (‘Power to the people,’ says hospital boss, October 24).
The false notion that public service and rabid commercialism can coexist is baseless. They are not the same and never can be: they are mutually at odds in both motivation and intention.
It is no surprise that Richard Branson’s hastily incorporated Virgin Health has been sniffing round the health service budget. There are potentially even richer pickings here than from the transport budget from which he extracted £24million last year alone via his Virgin Trains operation.
Added to the countless millions handed to shareholders in all the privatised rail companies, this is nothing but a complete and utter waste of public money. The same would happen to health.
At a time when the private sector has shown itself to be both venal and incompetent like never before (and is whingeing and whining for handouts from the public purse) the fact that there are still dunderheads in national and local government who are even considering handing over vast sums of public money to the likes of Branson and his ilk beggars belief.
Either we want public services and pay for them in cash via taxation or we don’t.
The sooner the blather we hear from our overseers about how we can have it both ways stops the better. It is not true and it never was.
MARTIN KENNEDY
Brewer Street, W1

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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