Letters: Lies, spin and mortality misinformation

These letters appear in the 13th February 2016 edition of The Independent

Junior Doctors protest outside the Department of Health at the Government's intention to impose new contracts (Getty)

Your report on the junior doctors’ strike (11 February) includes a quote from a health department official that the BMA had “not made any offer that would support the NHS in tackling excess mortality rates at the weekend”. This is hardly surprising, since the assertion that the alleged excess mortality has anything to do with staffing levels is completely unsupported by evidence, and is the result either of misinterpretation of that evidence by a scientifically illiterate secretary of state, or a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.

The fact that government officials continue to state that the new junior doctor contract has anything to do with seven-day working (which we already have) or with reducing weekend mortality rates is an illustration of their belief that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, it will eventually be accepted.

Dr Bob Bury

Leeds

One of the sticking points that is delaying a deal between junior doctors and Jeremy Hunt, it seems, is the Saturday working. The doctors want Saturday working to be overtime rates, essentially. Hunt says no, only after 5pm will the extra payment apply.

Weekend shifts are the norm in many fields. As a reporter on regional newspapers I had to work Saturdays and Sundays for no extra pay – even after 5pm. Instead you got a day off in the week. So why would you be any more tired and be risking patients’ safety?

Rose Taylor

Peterborough

Doctors already work weekends, of course, because the NHS is a seven-day service, no matter what Jeremy Hunt spins. But as a matter of principle, it should be acknowledged that Saturday is not a normal working day.

This isn’t about doctors demanding unseemly sums to work weekends. The BMA put forward a cost-neutral proposal that maintained the unsocial hours premium but reduced basic pay rise to account for that. It was rejected.

Dr Balmer

Manchester

Dr Paul Baird (letters, 10 February) reminds us that Jeremy Hunt studied economics. A chapter of the old textbook he could re-read is the one about returns on investments. Most junior doctors trained in the UK at medical schools funded by our taxes. Now that they are qualified, their work can be seen as repaying the cost of their education. If Mr Hunt’s stubbornness results in doctors quitting the NHS for countries with more favourable working conditions, he will be squandering both our taxes and the goodwill underlying the quid pro quo aspect of medical education.

S Lawton

Kirtlington, Oxfordshire

Many junior doctors resign because the Government-imposed contract is unacceptable to them. The NHS begins to collapse. Private companies rescue the situation by employing the doctors and supplying their services to the NHS at commercial rates. The Government claims it has solved the problem of BMA intransigence. The companies, being private and mostly foreign-owned, manage their affairs professionally and pay little UK tax. QED. Mission accomplished for the rich and powerful.

Dr David Rhodes

Nottingham

Someone should point out to Jeremy Hunt that it is legally and logically impossible to “impose” a contract on anybody.

Colin Yarnley

Southwell, Nottinghamshire

The chances are that we will see our doctors deserting the NHS, leaving it completely untenable and ripe for privatisation, using the doctors as scapegoats. If we are really passionate about our NHS belonging to us, and not profit-driven businesses, then we must fight for it, and show this Government we know what it is up to.

John Hudson

Derby

Jeremy Hunt is still claiming that, under the proposed junior doctors’ contract, hours worked will reduce, pay will remain the same, yet weekend patient care will be raised to the standards of weekday care – and all of this will happen with no significant increase in overall costs. Wow! He must have a magic wand.

Peter Cave

London W1

Isn’t it odd that we won’t allow lorry drivers to work over a certain number of hours a week for safety reasons, yet allow doctors to work 90 hours a week?

Michael Adams

Exeter

Refugees deserve our compassion

Egged on by Ukip and the popular press Britain is making a miserable response to the need to accept refugees from the awful crises in Syria and other regions of the Middle East and Africa.

My shame at this is exacerbated by the fact that, in the years immediately following the Second World War, our then war-torn and poverty-stricken country accepted 86,000 DPs (displaced persons) from Europe plus 115,000 Polish veterans. No doubt some of these returned to their home countries while others moved on to places like Canada, the US and Australia, but many stayed on to make their homes here and contribute to British society.

Our nation certainly hasn’t suffered any long-term damage as a result of our compassion in those desperate times. Surely we can now accept a few thousand children without destroying our society.

Peter Milner

Shrewsbury

If David Cameron is willing to think of prisoners as assets rather than liabilities (front page, 8 February), could he not apply this positive approach to young asylum-seekers? Having, quite rightly, looked after unaccompanied children and educated them until they are 18, this country could then benefit from their skills and energy instead of cruelly returning them to often war-torn countries where they may have no family or connection. It is a pitiless policy which deprives both us and the asylum-seekers.

Sylvia Platt

Oxford

If our neighbour’s house were on fire most of us would open our doors and let our neighbours in. Why is it different when a whole country is burning?

Bambos Charalambous

Manchester

Why cannot politicians and public get it into their heads that people fleeing for their lives or seeking better ones, sometimes both, are not very interested in our benefits system. Maybe we ought to crack down on Brits exploiting other EU benefits systems, but I don’t hear much about that.

Cole Davis

London NW2

Members’ jobs come first for unite

Andy McSmith’s “McCluskey urges loyalty to Corbyn – but forgets Trident” (10 February) could not have been more wrong. Let me set the record straight: Unite will never sacrifice our members’ jobs in the defence sector, no matter who is leader of the Labour Party.

He could have easily clarified this for himself with a simple phone call, whereupon we could have told him about Unite’s upcoming special conference of defence workers, bringing together our members across the country.

Or he could have checked with the Oxford Union whereupon he would have been told that I addressed the issue of Trident fully in the Q&A session where it was more appropriate.

Come on Andy, please do not sow division where there is none. And just so you are 100 per cent clear from now on – members’ jobs and their communities come first in Unite.

Len McCluskey

Unite general secretary

London WC1

Matthew Norman (10 February) sets out the hollow arguments over renewal of the UK’s Trident nuclear capability. Having Trident may have been a deterrent against a coherent state, but it is no deterrent against a rogue extremist.

Howard Fuller

Abingdon, Oxfordshire

There’s no positive proof of relativity

“The theory of relativity proved” says your headline (12 February), but scientific theories can never be “proved” right; they can only be proved wrong. A theory is usable until such time as a new experiment shows it to be fallacious. It is a tribute to the towering intellectual feat that is general relativity that it has endured, but as Martin Rees (12 February) shows, Einstein himself wasn’t precious about the theory, submitting a paper – subsequently shown to be wrong – purporting to show that gravitational waves couldn’t exist.

Complacency in science is dangerous; physics was thought to be all figured out at the end of the 19th century – and look what happened then.

Professor Martin Williams

St Albans, Hertfordshire

Puzzle of the political peerage

Your 10 February headline “Corbyn ‘will deny Jack Straw a peerage’”, based on the anonymous views of a “senior Labour Party figure”, is fiercely illustrated in Dave Brown’s cartoon of a ferocious Corbyn about to – decapitate? – a blubbering Jack Straw. Yet all I find in the article itself is a denial by the Labour leader’s spokesman that Corbyn is even considering the peerage question...

Carla M Wartenberg

London NW3