KEEP calm and carry on. Form an orderly queue. 

There is something in the English nature that takes adversity on the chin stoically. 

Maybe it is coping with the weather. 

So we shrug and meekly accept messages of austerity and see wages shrink for the many, whilst the elite few double their income and pay no tax. 

Austerity falsehoods also hit public services; police, teachers and now our local NHS. 

As a doctor my prime concern is my patients. 

What will next week’s Clinical Services Review decision date mean for Weymouth and Portland? 

We stand to lose all 12 Portland beds at a stroke and later Westhaven beds with only some of the current 36 transferred to the Melcombe Avenue site. 

Here we have already lost our dementia beds. 

At Linden we are set to lose our 12 mental health beds entirely with no alternatives in the town. 

Others may crow that Bournemouth will benefit and won’t that be great for us too? 

Never mind the travelling. Look at the beds being lost.

Our town is being sacrificed to balance Dorset’s books and build empires elsewhere. 

Yet there is another side to the English nature, one of dissent and assertiveness. 

Look back to our history of the Peasant’s revolt, the Lollards, the Levellers and Diggers in the Civil War, the Chartists, Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Suffragettes echoing down the centuries to the great post war reforms that established the caring welfare state and the NHS. 

So for any in this fine tradition join us outside the Dorford Centre in Dorchester on Wednesday, September 20 at 9.30am. 

MPs have voted for the national under-funding of social care and health that forced the Dorset CCG to cut beds but let’s not give up our local hospitals without a murmur of protest.

Dr Jon Orrell
Crescent Street
Weymouth