Jeremy Corbyn

• JEREMY Corbyn rightly points out that, prior to the Covid-19 crisis, Conservative governments wittingly underfunded the National Health Service and instituted radical cuts in social care, (How we can build a better world after Covid, January 22).

Resultant shortages of nurses, doctors and facilities much aggravate the current coronavirus Covid-19 crisis in hospitals and care homes.

That is depressing enough. Mr Corbyn is too polite to mention what is further depressing, namely how ministers and their supporters express no regret, no remorse, no apology, for how their earlier policies left us in such a dire state.

A further depressing fact is how very rarely do interviewers put those points to ministers.

On the very few occasions when they have, they have allowed ministers to wave them away as irrelevant, sometimes with bluster and a ruffling of hair.

One minister made the glib response that no one had been asking for 50,000 intensive care beds.

Ministers’ displays of their magnificent lack of shame harmonises well with those liberty-loving Conservatives who oppose the Covid-19 restrictions because they are so worried about how the most disadvantaged suffer most.

After all, those liberty-lovers did not worry much prior to Covid. They eagerly supported policies that made matters worse for the disadvantaged.

All this suggests that once this crisis is over, unless we have a government minded by the decency of Mr Corbyn and his policies, the struggles of nurses, doctors, care-workers, cleaners, drivers et al will be forgotten.

And worse, one way or another they will bear the brunt of policies allegedly necessary to put the economy right.

Recall who suffered most to put things right after the ways of wealthy bankers, financiers, and City traders had led to the global financial crisis.

PETER CAVE, W1