This is what you have been writing to us about this week.

To send your own letter, email bfpletters@london.newsquest.co.uk.

Please note, any letters sent to the Bucks Free Press office are only being picked up periodically as all staff are still working from home.

Dangerous roads or drivers?

Driving and driving safely is one of my greatest passions so I was very keen to read an article in BFP on October 30 about dangerous roads analysed by Transport for Buckinghamshire (TfB).

Very alarming details regarding serious and fatal crashes that have occurred on these particular stretches of roads, TfB look at these incidents and look to see what can be improved by such things as road layouts, signage etc. My thoughts are that it’s not actually the roads that are at fault but the drivers who are using them!

In all my years of driving, and by that I mean an amount of miles well in excess of one million, I have never encountered a road that could not be traversed safely. One just needs to be fully aware of every aspect of the road you are on, travel at the correct speed to suit the prevailing conditions and most of all use common sense - sadly something that is missing in far too many drivers’ brains.

From observations that I make during every road trip, the majority of drivers are in need of further tuition - just passing the standard driving test is only the start of one’s driving career.

Funny how people think that to be good at most things requires training, using a computer, first aid, sports, even cooking and a multitude of other things, but don’t have driver training.

Driving a car safely and expertly should be the top priority as it can be, and is, a matter of life and death.

IAM RoadSmart, AKA The Institute of Advanced Motorists, is one of the organisations that does a great job of training drivers to be at the top of their game.

Try it - it may just save your life.

Roy Craig, Hazlemere

Write – but don’t expect results

A letter in today‘s print BFP (November 6), from the Royal College of Nursing, urges readers to email MPs to support a fair pay rise for nursing staff. I shall do this but in my view it’s a wasted effort. In 2017 the Labour Party attempted to abolish the one per cent cap on public sector pay and was defeated by the Conservatives in Parliament. The nurses’ situation is the result of a world-view among Conservatives that makes letter writing pointless.

Since 2010 – since we have had a Conservative government – England’s public health has broadly worsened for the first time since World War II.

The 2012 Lansley Act abolished regional health authorities, public health directors and local primary care trusts. Health directors were swallowed into poorer local authorities without ring-fenced funds. Immunisations have fallen. The number of school nurses fell to 2,000 for 33,000 schools. Health visitors declined in number throwing a burden on GP’s. Life expectancy stalled, with poorer women dying younger and infant mortality rose.

A report in the Guardian in 2018 described how Richard Branson’s Virgin Care had won almost £2bn worth of contracts since 2010 - Branson promised to reinvest any profit back into the NHS: “If and when I could take a dividend from Virgin Care…” however NHS campaigners were sceptical: “The complexity of the healthcare arm… with myriad companies… makes it difficult to work out which elements of the business are profitable and where profits end up.”

Also in 2018 three independent health research trusts complained the 3.4 per cent increase in NHS funding that year was insufficient: ‘‘Increases of at least 4% a year are the minimum needed to tackle the backlog of financial problems from eight years of austerity...”

The UK is among the great hubs of scientific research, with 44 virology labs across the NHS, more throughout academia, and massive public health expertise.

Despite this, Covid test and trace was almost entirely given to private companies - Deloitte handled the huge Lighthouse Labs that couldn’t get through tests and Serco was one of two private companies involved in the contact tracing system that regularly missed government targets.

The Guardian commented acidly: “…failure pays: Serco’s initial fee for running tracing was £108m. Then there are the consultants buzzing around this cash cow… McKinsey scooped £560,000 for six weeks’ work creating the ‘vision, purpose and narrative’ of a new public health authority… Nobel laureate and head of the Francis Crick Institute, Sir Paul Nurse, wrote three times to Downing Street and Hancock at the start of the pandemic, offering to coordinate university labs to help the NHS in testing for Covid. Had his proposal been taken up, he says, up to 100,000 tests a day might have been done from very early on. That alone could have avoided some of the deaths in our care homes. He didn’t get a reply…”

This August, in a letter to England’s chief medical officer nearly 70 clinical virologists said they had been sidelined by the government and excluded from discussions on how to respond to the pandemic: “…contracts (were) awarded on apparently ideological grounds to private sector companies rather than based on expertise.”

At the start of the pandemic similar complaints were made about PPE procurement when the government tried to involve Burberry and Barbour - Kate Hills of Make It British, said the government was ignoring textile specialists in favour of household names that played well with the public: “The people who can make this PPE are not well-known names, they are contract manufacturers behind the scenes. They’ve filled in the government’s request forms and heard nothing back.”

In the past few weeks the government has been criticised for selling off ‘surplus’ NHS land – Huffpost described how: “…NHS bosses said 131 of the sites listed as ‘surplus’ were actually in use… But starved of alternative sources of funding, the freedom to sell land could leave some trusts little option but to offload it just to make ends meet.”

The government has a long record of doggedly involving the private sector, particularly parts with connections to the Tory party, (think Dido Harding) in healthcare, apparently because the private sector represents ‘free market vigour’ and *must* save money painlessly, whereas health professionals and administrators are ‘the dead hand of local government bureaucracy’.

As the RCN letter pointed out, in the last ten years the value of nurses’ wages has fallen 12.5 per cent. Since January 2010 MPs have had nine pay rises - from £64,766 to £ 81,932 – a 21 per cent increase.

According to the NHS website, amongst the purely medical personnel at the upper end of the scale a modern matron (nursing) or a nurse consultant with 4-5 years receive £45,753. Their more junior colleagues, including operating department practitioners, radiographers and practice managers, start at £24,907 and after seven years reach £30,615.

Giving small pay rises to keep people, often working-class, in the health sector, who work humbly and know what they are doing through training and experience, goes against the grain too far for this government.

Conservatives will not accept some jobs are the responsibility of government – this year our five local MPs voted down amendments to the Trade Bill preventing any deal which ‘undermines or restricts’ a comprehensive public-funded health service, free at the point of delivery (and would have guaranteed our ability to control medicine pricing and patient data protection).

Since the 2019 Autumn Purge of Intelligent Tories the only surviving local MP who voted in 2017 to keep the one per cent cap on public sector workers’ pay must be Steve Baker, who can be relied on to still not support the NHS, (he is on record saying: ‘Number one the welfare state isn’t good enough and number two we can’t afford it.’) and the other local MPs are too new to go against their party’s prevailing orthodoxy - so by all means write in support of the RCN but don’t expect any results.

Lawrence Linehan, Wooburn Green

What happens if the President dies?

“Keeping a close eye on the American election is not a luxury but a necessity for the various Arab Gulf capitals”, wrote Abdulkhaleq Abdulla for mei.edu on 23 October.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament Liaison Office in the UK hosted a webinar on 4 November called “The US elections: the day after”.

Two MEPs spoke on implications of the election for EU-US relations, UK-US ties, and the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom.

The first was Radosław Sikorski, who chairs the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with the United States. He is also in the European Parliament’s EU-UK Friendship Group.

The second was João Vale de Almeida, who is the first EU Ambassador to the UK. Before that, he was the EU Ambassador to the US and the UN.

The USA’s George Mitchell helped to write the Good Friday Agreement. The European Union is committed to the agreement made with the UK that protects the GFA and peace and stability on the island of Ireland.

A question has been raised - if the President of the USA is removed, incapacitated, dies or resigns, the Vice President becomes President.

Who then becomes Vice President? The 25th Amendment, dated 1967, says in that case, “the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress”.

Phil Jones, European Movement UK, Bourne End