This government has deliberately run down the NHS over a decade. I gave the comparative investment figures in the NHS of successive governments a few weeks ago. By a country mile, the Tories since 2010 have been the worst, no competition. Even before this pandemic, waiting lists for specialist treatment were ballooning out of control and A&E waiting targets were being routinely missed on an ever-deteriorating basis. There's no doubt in my mind that there is an agenda to replace the NHS with insurance-style private medicine. Here are three letters from the Guardian, whose sentiments I entirely agree with:

Your report on the state of the NHS (One in four Britons ‘not confident NHS can care for them’, survey reveals, 26 December) was summed up by the quote from Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary: “With record waiting lists, 100,000 NHS staff shortages and 112,000 vacancies in social care in 2019, the Tories left our health service criminally ill-equipped for Covid.”

My husband, in the final stages of dementia and awaiting a place in care, is in a holding ward. Insufficient nurses try to cope, but mouth hygiene is neglected. And no shower or hair wash for more than a month. He deserves better. Hardly God’s waiting room, more like death row. Aneurin Bevan will be turning in his grave.
Hilda Reynolds
Bristol

• You report that one in four of us is not sure that the NHS can care for them. I wonder if this stage in public sentiment was envisaged or even engineered as part of a transition to a system of private healthcare. For almost two years we have been bludgeoned with the command to protect the NHS. But protecting the NHS is not primarily our responsibility – it’s the government’s. There’s nothing inevitable about the NHS having to struggle along on inadequate resources while its staff compensate for the deficit with heroic amounts of goodwill.
Susan Tomes
Edinburgh

• In the past four months, three friends of mine, all ardent believers in the NHS, have swallowed their principles and paid for private operations to avoid a wait of up to two years for surgery that would restore their quality of life. They have no doubts about the quality of care provided by the NHS, but its underresourcing means that long waits for non-urgent interventions have become painfully inevitable.

With a heavy heart, I fear that I would do the same in their position. This is what 11 years of underfunding has come to. And yes, I do believe that this is a Conservative strategy towards private healthcare, in which, because we can afford to do so, we find ourselves colluding.
Ruth Pickles
Congleton, Cheshire

I haven't bought private medical care and my principles have never allowed me to do so. But I can afford it if push comes to shove. So what would I do if a loved one was in constant pain and couldn't get NHS treatment? I know two ladies, both now in advanced years, who have hip troubles that are seriously affecting their quality of life. One can't get referred at all at the moment and the other has been told that the waiting list is two years long. You are in your seventies and you are virtually immobilised and you have to wait two years (if you're lucky...) Just before the first lockdown I had an appointment to see my GP about a painful shoulder which had troubled me for a year. I'd waited five weeks for the GP appointment in any case, and two days before it I was told that face-to-face appointments had been cancelled due to COVID-19. The doctor telephoned me and said that he could no longer refer me to a consultant and that all he could advise was that I should take paracetamol.

So don't believe any numbers you see about the five or six million on waiting lists. There are millions more of us who can't even get on a waiting list. Suppose the sun came out tomorrow and the pandemic disappeared. How long do you think it will take to get the waiting lists down to pre-Tory levels? Well I'll tell you. It won't happen inside the lifetime of anyone reading this post.