Do you remember those Conservative adverts in the run up to the last election The NHS Will Be Safe in Our Hands – or words to that effect? Nobody really believed it, which is probably one of the main reasons why the Tories didn’t actually win the election. Not that you can believe that, given the way things have gone, with their Lib-Dem coalition partners rolling over and not doing what they should be doing – which is to save us from the worst excesses of the lunatic right wingers.

I happened to be working in the NHS the last time the Conservatives got into power (Thatcher) and in no time flat they had their claws on the Health Service and were busy ‘reforming’ away like mad. This meant that one whole tier of the NHS was abolished and thousands lost their jobs. At the time I was running the library in an NHS county HQ and obviously that was deemed to be something which was completely unnecessary. I actually think that the politicians must have thought that it was a library full of novels, rather than the medical books and journals which furnished the shelves.

So at great cost people were put out of work, and here we are 30 years on and the Tories are doing exactly the same thing again. The reorganisation is going to cost £billions and it will result in a worse service and is no doubt the preliminaries of the Health Service being privatised in the end.

There is definitely waste in the NHS as there is with any large organisation but the way to deal with it is to stop tinkering and slashing services and just identify where things could be improved and do it.

Will the Lib-Dems wake up and do the decent thing – or are they too feart (frightened) of Flashman and the rest of the bullies? The people who do not support Cameron wholeheartedly have not even been invited to any discussions. The word ‘fascists’ comes to mind.

I’m just glad that all this nonsense seems not to be going ahead in Scotland, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about our ‘cousins’ in England.