YOUR leader (LET, March 31) on Michael Hindle's 'disturbing view of the NHS in East Lancashire' puts it in a nutshell when it said he 'might have taken the opportunity much earlier,' during his 16 years of service on the local health authority, to discover the pernicious impact that market-driven reforms have had on the health care of the nation.

In the first half of the 1980s, I served with Mr Hindle, on the then Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Health Authority.

I sat as a TUC-nominated member, but also represented the broader union movement.

Eventually, the Quangos took over with the voluntary, quite-rightly, unpaid members being replaced by government-selected and approved individuals at some £7,000 a year. Mr Hindle was one of them.

The attack on the NHS goes back, of course, well before Mr Hindle's suddenly discovered market reforms.

The Lancashire Evening Telegraph, through its covering authority meetings, provided extremely valuable support for those members holding their corner against increasing government attacks on the service.

Events were clearly ideologically driven by people who quite simply did not believe in the principles and philosophy on which Nye Bevan founded the NHS in 1945.

Now, we have the unseemly sight of public wringing of hands by individuals reporting on deficiencies in the NHS, self-evident and comprehensively documented and reported elsewhere.

This transformation from a self-inflicted lobotomy to the possession of scientific hindsight will not clear away the responsibility and guilt of those who in the Eighties and Nineties were active participants in the continued harm done to our health service.

CLIVE EDWARDS, Hope Street, Blackburn.

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