VENTURE capitalists (VCs) go about their business of ‘asset stripping’ by first gaining control of a target company.

They destabilise it by denying it resources such as manpower and development cash. Existing employees and distributors are deliberately antagonised.

Their terms and conditions are made impossible to comply with until total closure and disposal of the company’s assets can be called ‘justifiably necessary’.

The real culprits then pick over the carcass and disappear with valuable leftovers such as customer records, real estate and intellectual property.

Successive Labour and Tory governments had been failing UK’s crown jewels by allowing the dissemination of NHS services which is now relentless and threatens total meltdown.

Our health service was already weakened by tiers of bureaucracy spending fortunes on management consultants when the Tories appeared on the scene in 2010.

Their austerity campaign looked designed for purpose – the stealthy stripping out of more assets for others to own. Instead of borrowing at negligible interest rates and investing in our own new property, they promoted PFI (Private Finance Initiative) which could enable private companies to make substantial profits by building new hospitals to lease to the NHS. Instead of providing sufficient hospital staff and doctors for a growing population by investing in training, fair wages and working conditions, employees have been treated so badly they have left in droves to join ‘temp’ agencies that pay them not much more per hour than the NHS. Now we have to hire them back at grossly inflated rates.

Large corporations like Virgin will soon take over hospital services including cancer care. Already £20billion pa (20% of the NHS budget) is being contracted out. Health workers and the buildings they work in are being vacuumed up by huge corporations.

Oliver Letwin was reported as saying that ‘within five years of a Tory government being elected, the NHS would be unrecognisable’. I would describe it now as looking like a scene from a Spanish bullfight. The poor beast is first weakened by loss of blood from the wounds of the picadors’ lances before standing helplessly, head bowed, as its executioner approaches to deliver the final ‘coup de grace’. Whatever, it’s all getting too painful to watch now and I feel I’ve let it down.

Mike Joslin

Dorchester