Thanks spaceyjase; they've got my signature too now. I urge everyone else to sign too.

   I went straight into supporting the campaign by 38 degrees:

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/Protect_our_NHS_Petition#petition

Why? Because I don't feel as though Mr. Redwood is in touch with members of his constituency. I don't feel as though he has been proactive in canvassing opinion about the proposed bill. But then this does feel true to form with the head of the Conservative party effectively putting his fingers in his ears and shouting "La la la, I'm not listening".

Bed Goldacre has written a lot about the NHS changes. Read more here:

http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/what-will-the-nhsbill-do-i-dont-think-youre-w

   Mavdo, thanks for going to the effort of writing most of what I feel and saving me the time. I'm shocked at the state and running of this country, and I hope that a better man (or woman!) than me can come along and change things. I fear not, though; millionaires will continue to privatise businesses so their millionaire friends can make more millions. And tax everyone else along the way. While making everyone's life worse. if only people had a sense of shame and/or decency.

   Righto Mr Redwood. I will be writing to you regarding the NHS as well as the disgraceful train fares fiasco that is about to unfold that is pretty close to the Beeching Report in its far reaching implications that, as usual, are being utterly ignored by hard-line Tories such as yourself. Let me repeat my previous well worn comment - just charging people more to do something does not "level demand", or "encourage people to find alternatives". It just makes people pay more for a service at the time it is least comfortable to use, and it is already disgustingly expensive at times (eg £110 Wokingham-Bath return before 9am, yet travelling on mostly empty trains)!

Your comments on QT were almost as polarised as Labour's were. You made some good points, but failed to directly address Labour's response, as Labour's response did to your comments. If you had said what you would replace it with, or even that you wouldn't get rid of it until you'd found something that targetted the same people, but actually worked better, the response from Labour couldn't have been so simplified to a vote winning tag line that actually contained nonsense. Labour's response of "making tax concessions to the top 1% of earners shouldn't be the priority" was common sense, but utterly blind to the fact that it makes less money *not* to do so, and the rest of us therefore end up paying a bigger share anyway even *with* the 50p tax rate! I'm actually in favour of dropping the 50p tax because those who don't pay it ironically end up paying a larger percentage of tax. Effectively, the country is paying more to attempt to get more tax from higher earners. Nothing wrong with the right half of that sentence, IMO, but everything wrong with the left half. There needs to be another way, and it needs to be done fairly and evenly.

Back to the NHS - I don't understand how so many organisations can be so bitterly opposed to a plan, and yet the government brushes their concerns aside, and makes such an obvious effort to spin this as a good thing. The meeting where the government invited "supporters" of the scheme to show people how much support there was for this, was attended by a few minor medical organisations, whilst the biggest unions and medical groups didn't even know about it. I like giving GPs choice, but I don't like the way we keep closing hospitals, and moving patient care from wider and wider areas into hospitals that aren't getting any bigger and are often quite hard to get to. Bracknell is served by hospitals in Frimley and Slough which are miles away, and Wokingham by Reading. But my biggest fear is that you are further fragmenting an already fragmented system, and allowing profit grabbers into a national service where they don't fit or belong. With the railways, this is exactly what happened, and we now have a company owning the track (now renationalised, but still grabbing back large chunks of money), a company owning the trains, multiple companies running the services, and so it goes on. Each of these have directors that for some reason need to be hugley "rewarded" for doing such "excellent" work, and multiple levels of paper pushers. This pushes up the cost of running the railways to the tune of roughly five-fold - and an extra £2.1bn a year of subsidy was required despite a massive increase in ticket costs. Just look at the cost of a chocolate bar in a station compared with 100 yards outside and you see that things in the railway cost more for no apparent reason.

The idea of taking away levels of management, who just understand 'money money money' and not providing the service that they have been tasked with doing, and giving it over to the GPs, who in theory understand patient care first, is fine. The way you are going about it, I suspect is not.

And have you actually thought that the reason people aren't writing to you to tell you this is wrong is because we are (a) an intelligent bunch who aren't jumping to conclusions, and haven't actually got any conclusions other than the ones we've been spoon fed by the biased media, (b) we don't think you'll ever do anything about a concern we address to you. I think it is understandable why you've had no comments.

Eesh!

As for David Starkey! Words fail me with him. Just get him off the telly, please!

   Everywhere else in the country people are disgusted with what's happening to the NHS. Even in Maidenhead the other week, the local Labour party spoke to hundreds of people who were against them, and who were delighted to sign our petition.

Do we really think that there the people of Wokingham are so vastly different, and are racing to embrace the marketisation and privatisation of the health service? Or is it more likely that they don't think John "safe seat" Redwood would listen to them if they did write to him?

   http://www.getwokingham.co.uk/blogs/andanotherthing/s/2109703_phillip_lee_mp_nhs_itemised_account_bill_aimed_to_provoke_debate

See the above for local reaction to another idiot's supposition that people in Wokingham aren't bothered about the NHS changes.