The pain of privatisation

• WITH strikes on the train, tube and bus services and with the crisis in National Health Service dental provision, let’s note how differently the Conservative government responds.

Regarding the transport workers, striking for better pay and conditions, the government dishes out strong condemnation, emphasising the resultant travel disruption, even though it lasts for just a few days and strikers lose pay.

Regarding highly inadequate NHS dental provision, not a peep comes from the government by way of criticising those dentists who leave the NHS for better pay and conditions in private practice or corporations; even though their departure leads to the suffering of millions of people unable to afford private dental care. The suffering is often acute and certainly lasts for far longer than a few days “dental disruption”.

Let’s give praise to those many dentists who continue to provide NHS dental services even if alongside private practice.

I’m afraid that I cannot have much sympathy or understanding for those dentists who have left the NHS for good (though not for the good of untreated NHS patients).

After all they could surely have kept some NHS services available even if subsidising them from their private work.

Sadly I fully understand why Conservative ministers for over a decade have witnessed the radical decline in NHS dental provision and have done nothing about it.

After all, that fits in well with their policy of letting public services decline, presumably with the aim of private companies gaining a stranglehold.

Witness the decline over the last decade or so of legal aid, access to the courts, provision of public libraries, community support, the police, prisons, forensic services, environmental health resources; and, of course, social care and the NHS more generally.

Witness what the government allows private companies to get away with, Thames Water, auditors, suppliers of Covid-19 protection… Oops, I had better stop.

Time for a despairing drink.

PETER CAVE, W1