AT a recent Kidderminster public meeting former MPs, Dr Richard Taylor and Dave Nellist, agreed that socialist measures are needed to save the NHS.

To all intents and purposes the NHS has already been abolished. There is no longer public planning, and a great deal of public money is being lost to private profit and the excessive administrative costs of an unnecessarily complex system.

Dr Taylor warned that the promise of the Labour Party to revoke the present government’s Health and Social Care Act does not go far enough. The NHS must return to a fully integrated national scheme. There should be no more PFI contracts which leave us with a private consortium owning Worcestershire Hospital at great cost to taxpayers.

The break-up of the NHS into Trusts behaving like private companies, with the split between purchasers and providers, must be abolished. The transformation of the NHS from a public service to a private business opportunity will be furthered by the proposed free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. The NHS must be exempted from this as it belongs to the people.

Mr Nellist said that government talks of transferring the NHS from the state to community-based care is simply a cover for handing it over to private organisations. He called for a return to the founding principles of the NHS in 1948, with free prescriptions, free eye care and free dental care. We can afford it. British capitalists currently hold over £700bn cash assets which they do not know how to spend.

Thirty people attended the public meeting organised by Worcestershire Socialist Party. Because it suits all main parties to avoid open discussion about the failings of an NHS broken up by all of them when in power, It was a rare opportunity to hear the truth about the NHS from Dr Taylor's National Health Action Party and Mr Nellist's Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).

NIGEL GILBERT Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition Tynings Close, Kidderminster