• PARLIAMENT returns this week, and MPs will find out what Boris Johnson’s ministers have been doing during their absence, discussing trade terms between the United Kingdom and the United States, and in drawing up their new Trade Bill.

This is the bill that Boris Johnson has repeatedly promised will protect our National Health Service.

He promised it will not be for sale to the pharmaceutical monsters who have been lobbying successfully for this opportunity; he promised to stop the continuing privatisation of NHS services; he promised not to accept US demands to lower the standards and raise the price of medications the NHS purchases.

But surprise: the Trade Bill does nothing to protect the NHS.

Only if the NHS is exempted from the Trade Bill will it have any protection; and it will only be exempted if enough MPs fight hard enough to get NHS exemption written into the bill.

We are deep in the Covid-19 pandemic. If nothing else, this shows us starkly how vital our NHS services are.

We need to do more for them than the Thursday clap out of our windows or crowdfund for services we’ve already paid for through taxes and national insurance.

And we need to protect ourselves, our children and our grandchildren from the devastating and cruel lack of a public health service that America’s big pharma demands. And that we had in Britain until Labour established the NHS.

So please join forces and write to your MP, demanding that they work to get the Trade Bill amended to exempt the NHS.

Thanks on behalf of, among others, my grandsons.

ED FREDENBURGH
N1