Readers' letters - January 11

Jeremy Hunt has noticed January’s first week is the busiest of the year – as it was last year... and every other.

So why haven’t they provided sufficient resources to the NHS to cope?

Hunt, like boss May, thanked NHS staff profusely for working beyond the call of duty.

Hunt says it takes seven years to train a doctor and three a nurse, so it takes time to come through.

What about the staff

morale resulting from Government policies? Many junior doctors leave the country and the NHS because of Hunt and the Government’s determination to impose new contracts rather than negotiate with the BMA.

NHS staff, like all public servants, have suffered an annual reduction in living standards because of wage restraints imposed for seven years by the Tories and their Lib Dem allies. This was in response to the crisis

triggered by the private banking system’s self-

induced collapse.

Everyone acknowledges the need to find substantially more resources, but neither the Governments of Cameron or May have given any indication they understand the crisis.

In 10 years’ time, we will have a million more over-75s. But the Camerons, Cleggs, Osbornes, Cables and Hunts holding office in post-2010 Governments preferred giving tax breaks to their own class rather than invest properly in the NHS.

Words are cheap and the prospect of Hunt and co reversing their denial of

adequate funding for the NHS doesn’t look good. We must now have a Corbyn-led Government that will invest.

Royston Jones

Address supplied

We need a

sense of faith

Regardless of a person’s circumstances, they will at some point in life need a sense of faith. This faith doesn’t necessarily need to be in a particular religion but it does help in some cases.

What I do mean, however, is that more people need to have faith and believe in their own abilities and capacity for success. Admittedly this isn’t an easy thing to achieve, but how else can a person be successful in life if they don’t have a sense of faith?

There’s a quote that says “you may never know what

results come from your

action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result”

(Mahatma Gandhi) and that “all things are possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23).

Jaimes Lewis Moran

via email

Americans are friends of ours

May I remind those who denigrate Mr Trump, the American President, and oppose his visit to Britain, that the Americans are our best friends.

The Americans helped us valiantly to win the Second World War.

Many brave Americans sacrificed their lives for our sake.

The Americans have always been our loyal friends in peacetime, too.

Mr Trump, as President

of the United States of America, represents all these people.

We may not agree with much he says and does, but we should welcome our American friends in the best way we can.

Julie Dixon

Chorley

Tories slashed police funding

To Disgusted Citizen (WP letters January 9), the clocks in your house appear to have stopped at some point coming up to eight long years ago. Blame the last Labour Government all you like for motoring offenders not being locked up but if this was in any way a priority for the Conservatives, they have had a long time now to put it right.

Maybe, just maybe, the real villains of the piece are the Tories who have slashed funding to police forces and the penal system over the past eight years to the extent there are barely any road officers left to arrest these criminals of the road and barely any prison cells to throw them into.

Michael Roberts

via email

A mockery of justice system

Serial sex attacker and rapist John Warboys was jailed indefinitely in 2009, with a minimum term of eight years.

He has now been released by the Parole Board who, disgracefully, did not firstly advise all the victims about his imminent release.

While I suspect that many people will be shaking their heads at this early release, it surely highlights once again the inadequacies of our current justice system.

That prisoners serve a mere half of their sentences at the very most makes a mockery of any supposed deterrent.

Bob Watson

Address supplied

Should criminals have tougher punishments? Join the debate at:

https://www.wigantoday.net/news/your-say/readers-letters-january-9-1-8954726