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    Letter to: Tom Stevenson, The Daily Telegraph, London

    Paying for Health

    10 December 2005

    Dear Mr Stevenson,

    Your comment on Tuesday 6th December, on the pre Budget statement by Gordon Brown, is excellent as usual.

    Let us bear in mind that we are going to be landed with Gordon Brown as our Prime Minister and it would be of benefit to us all, if he took the challenge of 2005, as a wake up call, to introduce a modicum of wisdom into the governance of Britain.

    Like a good socialist, he will never give up hope of getting a lot for nothing. We could allow that desire to tempt him to do things never even thought of by the Tories. A discovery which could be of enormous value to us all, is the fact that there are ways in which a government can finance good things for everyone, without using tax payers money.

    The most valuable resource of any nation, anywhere, is the goodwill of its people. Therefore being effective in looking after the people, without going into the nanny mode, is a real winner. The concept of a National Health Service could be a good health service, when done properly. The health service is a real disaster when done by a nanny state

    We have two opposing forces here. One is the inevitable increase in the cost, as advancing technology makes the impossible easier to do. By its very nature a health service cannot pay for itself and therefore the additional money which must accompany scientific progress, has to be new money.

    Here lies the rub, because of the high expectation of the people which must be met and accommodated. If paid for with existing money extracted from the taxpayer the whole thing goes sour. The belief that we have to get poor in order to get well, is not conducive to good will.

    The truth is perhaps hard to believe, but the goodwill of the people is far more valuable than money. I'm sure you know that the morale of an army is very dependent on the knowledge that the wounded are well cared for. It is high morale which wins battles. High morale is priceless.

    My purpose in drawing this fact to your attention, is to show that when new money is minted, printed or somehow created by the Government, for creating health and is spent wisely and well, that new money cannot cause inflation how ever great the sum.

    The real challenge is to learn how to spend money wisely and well. Gordon Brown unfortunately, entirely devotes his wits to dreaming up new methods of taxation,. We need to coax our Statesmen to look in a new direction.

    I use the National Health Service partly because I am a doctor and partly to show that a new principle can be used to good effect, under the most impossible circumstances.

    There are so many ways in which this principle can be pressed into use with enormous benefit to Great Britain. Perhaps you do not know that to day, Labour allows the banks a monopoly on the creation of new money. This is a recipe for disaster when new money needed, has to be burrowed into existence. New money is now issued as credit. See in the attached letter.

    This practice is now set in stone, because there is a consensus that Government, cannot be trusted to create and issue new money for fear of inflation.

    That consensus must be broken and we could use the Labour Party to do it.

    Too many bankers in the Tory party. Do let me know if this letter intrigues you.


    Doctor Edward C Hamlyn MBChB