‘Thus austerity was a means of running down many parts of the NHS, weakening it, exhausting the workers, and, hey, American corporate comes along to buy’

• THE air we breathe and the National Health Service are the last things not privatised completely.

Towards this very aim the Tories have used populism, austerity, and deliberate delays in action.

These tactics began with Margaret Thatcher closing the mines to destroy strong working communities and, of course, their unions.

But also with a view to privatising the fuel industries – nuclear, electric, electronic – these are all weapons industries. Coal was not. Wasn’t corporate America involved in all that?

Reorganising the NHS into the hands of one politician, who has secret meetings: remember the CNJ forbidden to witness a meeting at the health centre in Bartholomew Road, where Simon Stevens, Matt Hancock and the centre director were dashing in by the back door in indecent haste?

It made it clear then what their agenda would be. Thus austerity was a means of running down many parts of the NHS, weakening it, exhausting the workers, and, hey, American corporate comes along to buy.

The cynicism of a false promise to struggling Brexiteers that Brexit would finance health. Get rid of the NHS and some more unions are weakened – US corporates aren’t keen to follow them. How convenient, too, to pass this problem of actual human beings to someone else to deal with.

It’s as cynical as the deliberate stoking of the housing “crisis” towards privatising all of it, thus undermining tenant power and social cohesion.

And people who show the truth openly always get mocked, everyone distracted by the mocking rather than listening to the awful facts.

Those who supported the mocking – and it’s not just the MPs – have allowed the NHS to be run down and given to the US. Stevens was around 20 years ago helping Tony Blair start the privatisation.

Good people like Candy Udwin and Shirley Franklin never stopped fighting for the NHS. They and all others like them, and everyone who still works in the NHS, are to be hugely thanked. We can all try to be like them.

LIZ JELLINEK, NW3