The Conservatives are the Party of the NHS

Sir

I would like to congratulate local Labour MP Mike O’Brien on his recent appointment as a junior health minister. He seems to have a different job every time I blink.

But I note with disappointment that Mr O’Brien has once again used his regular column in the Nuneaton News to launch a negative political attack the Conservative Party, rather than to put forward any positive ideas from his own Party.

I suppose we must get used to these negative attacks from Labour politicians, because they are bereft of ideas and have nothing positive to say.

The Conservative Party is totally committed to the National Health Service. We are the only Party to ring fence the NHS from future spending cuts – Labour refuse to do so. We are committed to scrapping Labour’s top down, command and control, target culture and to trusting our healthcare professionals to get on with their jobs. We will stop Labour’s programme of cutting A&E and maternity services. We are committed to ending single sex wards and to doubling the number of single bedrooms. And we will protect family doctors from Labour’s impersonal plans to impose unwanted ‘polyclinics.’

Opinion polls now regularly show that the Conservatives are more trusted to run the NHS effectively than Labour are. I am not surprised, given that David Cameron’s personal commitment to the NHS is well know and beyond question.

I too am personally committed to working hard to protect and improve the NHS, and to set it free from Labour’s bureaucratic chains. My wife is a doctor and works full time in the NHS. I served for nine years in the Royal Army Medical Corps working in a military medical environment, and I now work part time as a non-executive director in an NHS Trust – working to use my experience to help improve mental healthcare in particular. I have first hand knowledge of the fantastic job NHS staff do on our behalf - and of the frustration they feel at the constant reorganisation, red tape and targets this Government has thrown at them year after year.

So when our local MP uses his newspaper column for cheap political attacks, rather than to explain what his own Party plans to do now that they have spent all of our money and saddled our children in debt, he will find that the people of Nuneaton & Bedworth are not in the mood to be taken for fools by him or his Party.

Dan Byles

Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for North Warwickshire & Bedworth