'Sack incompetent staff and bring back GP appointments'

THE Health Secretary is asking the public for advice on how the NHS could be improved. Here’s a few suggestions: identify quickly incompetent managers and sack them all; insist GPs organise their surgeries to accommodation seven-day maximum face-to-face appointments, which was the norm prior to Covid, and make social care a priority not a side issue.

To achieve all your promises, employ staff capable of doing so otherwise you will be just anther Secretary of State with plenty to say but no idea on implementation.

Also, concerning the open debate on “euthanasia” in which the leaders of the Church of England have made their negative views known, consider this, if you were lying in bed suffering excruciating incurable pain, which would you prefer a fatal dose of morphine or a blessing from the Archbishop of York?

Peter Rickaby,

West Park,

Selby

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Hypocrisy at show in latest Labour row

SO, a few Labour supporters go to campaign for the Democrat's candidate in the United States election and the Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is quick to complain.

Yet when Nigel Farage and Liz Truss go over to campaign for Trump or Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick voices support for dear old Donald, the silence is deafening.

Given that I'm expecting a Trump victory with maybe a little bit of extra foreign interference from Netanyahu and Israel, it seems clear to me that hypocrisy continues to run very deep in the Republican party, the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage's Reform.

Geoffrey Brooking,

Saxley Court,

Havant, Hampshire

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Remembering our 'Days of Thunder'

THANKS are due to your correspondent Mr Deamer, for his October 22 Press letter ´Days of thunder'.

He referred to the Wellington bomber designed by Barnes Wallis who could have based himself in York in 1930 but instead set up in ‘deepest Surrey’. Our loss?

By 1942 the principal aeroplane based on the plethora of bomber airfield in the North and East Riding was the Handley Page Halifax. For the last two years of the Second World War the predominant aero engine heard over this county was indeed the impressive-sounding Hercules with its impressive-sounding noise.

Turning back the clock to my infancy I can just about recall squadrons of Halifaxes massing, circling and forming up over the Fulford area where I lived, then heading east on daylight raids; a canopy of Duralumin. I trace the beginnings of my aviation interests back to then. It’s hard to believe that the Yorkshire topography was punctuated by so many aerodromes in those distant and different days.

On one occasion in the early 2000s I was ensconced in the pilot’s seat of the re-created Halifax out on Elvington airfield, flanked by the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial flight Lancaster and the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress “Sally B”, both live aircraft. How I wished that by some miracle those four decommissioned Hercules would start! On reflection I’m glad they didn’t as I wouldn’t have had much of a clue!

On the subject of the Halifax bomber and its precursors may I recommend The Yorkshire Bomber Story by Press journalism stalwart the late Chris Brayne, a slim but packed book published in 1992 by York & County Press in association with the Yorkshire Air Museum, presumably long out of print but really capturing the ambiance of those airfields and aircraft, the spirit of the aircrew and ground crew and the crowded skies of Yorkshire.

Derek Reed,

Middlethorpe Drive,

York

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