MADAM,

The election will soon be taking place and this long campaign, which Mrs May told us was to be ’the Brexit election,’ has nearly run its course. But we have still not been told by her or her ministers, or the Conservative candidate Mr Davies, nor yet by correspondents to the Beacon, of the material benefits that are to come, by walking away after 44 prosperous years from the European Union, the worlds largest market.

We have heard all about ’strength and stability’, but not a lot about ’integrity’. I mean by this that if she is elected she can be expected to claim in due course, everything on the Tory manifesto to have been endorsed by the electorate, giving her the mandate.

This would include the sneaky ’dementia tax,’ which is by any definition, a new and extraordinary death duty, sufficiently large to require one’s house to be pledged as collateral. The purpose we are told is to finance health care at home. But the NHS as we can all see, is overstretched and so instead of adding to their burden by choosing, as of right, to have care visits to one’s local hospital, if this is done at the patient’s home, thus relieving pressure on the hospital and the social services, the patient must pay for it. A smart Tory move? Or what is the alternative for those who have no house and only small funds – some modern version of the workhouse? 

When questioned on this fundamental change to the NHS provisions with which we have grown up, she commented that the system will otherwise run out of money. So is this the kind of prosperity that leaving the EU will bring? But would her ’Brexit election’ allow her to claim she has the people’s mandate for the ending of the hard won social contract, of ’health care, free at the point of delivery’?

Is she a fit and proper person to be entrusted with the care of the elderly sick?

I think not!

Clive Lindley.

(Monmouth)