PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘for possible publication’. We need your name and if possible, a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. We will include biographical details if you volunteer them. Letters may be shortened.
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The sheer waste of HS2
Dear Editor
HS2. For all those who lost their livelihoods, their sense of community and much more. Will their land be returned for agricultural use? Will people be returning to their houses? No and no.
It makes the upheaval and sheer waste of money even worse. And leaves the government owning the land. I wonder how that will work out?
Ann Stafford
Yorkshire
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The NHS chief’s song
Dear Editor
I am the head of the NHS
How I got there is anyone’s guess
But I served my time and paid my dues
Now I’ve stepped into dead man’s shoes.
All doctors and nurses report to me
In my capacity as their queen bee
Of pills and potions I know not much
The same of operations and such
But politics is where I shine
My knowledge of diversity is oh so fine.
My unchallenged writ runs over the realm
And ministers are thankful I’m at the helm.
Amid lockdown and Covid I proved my skill
I was an expert at overkill
I sacked all doubters and kept to the book
Steely resolution was all that it took.
Ministers of state relied on me
So my profile stayed as high as could be.
Now the pandemic is in the past
Doctors and nurses strikes come thick and fast
I don’t get involved in these disputes
I play a straight bat and fill my boots
I’m still the head of the NHS
The reason why we’re still in such a massive mess.
Patsy Lacey
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Why battery storage is a non-starter
Dear Editor
We are often told that battery storage is the solution to the variability of wind and solar power. However a bombshell new study that refutes this, ‘Large-Scale Electricity Storage’, has just been published by the Royal Society. The study was based on UK weather data between 1980 and 2016, and authored by some 50 professors and others of suitable expertise.
It indicates that the scale of storage required is ‘over 1,000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro’. It gives the 2019 figures that the UK grid had 30 GWh (gigawatt hours) of pumped hydro capacity, but only 1.8 GWh of battery capacity.
This engineering challenge is clearly not viable, never mind the cabling that would be required.
Geoff Moore
Ross and Cromarty
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The tragedy of irresponsible drug prescription
Dear Editor
In his speech to his Party conference, Sir Keir Starmer said: ‘People are looking to us because they want our wounds to heal and we are the healers.’
Well, it is high time the Labour Party healed the wounds of iatrogenic drug dependent patients – that means the development of dependence following medical treatment and irresponsible prescription – once and for all.
The particular debacle I am talking about is that of prescribed benzodiazepine drugs of dependence (BZDs, benzos), a problem that has affected millions, that still exists in Britain today and remains unaddressed. For decades ‘our wounds’ and suffering have been criminally ignored by the ruling classes, which includes the Labour Party. The late Professor C Heather Ashton, who dedicated her career to listening to hundreds of patients who came to her with their fears that the drugs were making, and had made, their conditions much worse and who rigorously collected the data, called the situation ‘a medical disaster akin to thalidomide’.
As far back as 1994, David Blunkett MP in a letter to me called it a national scandal. It is one that has been compounded since by the lack of any dedicated NHS withdrawal services and the eight million patients still being prescribed long-term antidepressants.
The situation is dire and life-threatening. In 2020 a US Food and Drug Administration study finally acknowledged there was a serious problem for those prescribed BZDs. But awareness of the extent of the problem remains very low.
If Sir Keir Starmer really wants to ‘heal our wounds’ and prove that the Labour Party ‘are the healers’, he could do no better than start here and make ‘The Ashton Manual’ the cornerstone of a new NHS Benzo recovery policy. He must prove it, by action and not just fine words.
Barry Haslam
Former chair of Oldham Tranx, permanently brain-damaged by prescribed benzodiazepine drugs, viz Ativan. His account is here.
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Stop it, TCW!
Dear Editor
I find TCW’s ceaseless striving to discredit such comforting and otherwise useful official narratives as those regarding climate change, Covid, transgenderism, etc to be beneath the contempt of any decent, right-thinking human being. The enthusiastically applied heel of a jackboot is too good for the lot of you.
Dr Anne Ayre, PhD, OCD, MSG
Upper Stratum
Editor’s Note: Please don’t take this too seriously.
