Voice of Despair II

The Liberal Democrats are delivering a ‘newspaper’ in the ward, whose front page repeats the story about Kingston Hospital services, which has been refuted by NHS SW London and Kingston Hospital. This ‘newspaper’ must have taken several weeks to prepare and write, yet the Health Overview Panel was told on Wednesday that the matter had become urgent only over the last weekend. The urgency seems to have stemmed from the imminent arrival of this ‘newspaper’ from the printers.

I know Mr. Davey sent emails to many of you asking for your support for his petition. This is a matter of grave community concern, not something to play party politics with, so I am at a loss to understand why he did not seek our support. He knows the email addresses of all of us councillors well enough.

I urge readers to see the letter from NHS SW London on the Health and Hospitals page before signing the petition form on the back of the ‘newspaper’.

If you do sign the form, think carefully before filling in your email address. The object of the exercise is to build up a database of private email addresses for future use. It says this in very small print which is very hard to read without a powerful glass, just conforming with the letter of the Data Protection Act.

Finally, the headline of the article says Labour has a plan to close the services. The logic of this statement is that the right thing to do is to vote Labour out of office nationally. You will not achieve that by voting Lib Dem at the next election, any more than it was achieved by voting Lib Dem in 1997, 2001 or 2005.

Please remember to recycle the paper.