The NHS’s problems began three or four decades ago when its nursing staff began to be treated like ‘slaves’.

Long hours, overwork caused by staff shortages and poor pay drove them in huge numbers into agency employment.

They were then hired back out to the NHS at hugely elevated rates.

Nurses got a higher rate of pay from their agents and had more control over how many hours they wanted to work but many then forewent sick pay, pensions and security.

These ‘middlemen’ agents now cost the NHS a fortune. A specialist nurse can cost the NHS thousands for a weekend stand-in as Dorset Council once confirmed.

Numerous administrative reorganisations forced the NHS to employ management consultants at £’000’s a day.

These became part of the ‘networking’ culture, endemic at Westminster.

The process the Tories are implementing is known as ‘asset stripping’. It works like this: a deliberate plan of destabilising a company with relatively large structural, intellectual or IT assets such as the NHS is first rendered impossible to run.

Insulting our public employees with a miserly 1% rise is destabilising its foundations.

Like many of your readers, I am not proud of the fact that faced with long NHS delays I have resorted to paying for private medical treatment even at its ridiculous cost.

By doing so I have diverted money away from the NHS.

We need to take care that we don’t use the failings imposed artificially on the NHS by Tory ideology as an excuse to ‘go private’.

MIKE JOSLIN

Garfield Avenue, Dorchester