WHO is this Diana Wallis MEP? (Letters, September 3) I don't know which party she belongs to, but I can tell her that the present problems with the NHS, which I served for 24 years, were caused by 18 years of hostility and mismanagement by the Tories.

Furthermore, if they had got their way at the time the NHS would never have been set up in the first place.

They introduced the wasteful "internal market", cut nurse training places by 30 per cent in their final years in office, handed it over to expensive, academic-obsessed universities paying measly bursaries who don't know how to train nurses for real practice, thus causing huge drop-out rates.

The Tories also set up the business-inspired system of chief executives with a plethora of supporting publicity departments - more waste - while forcing nurses into an eight-month long dispute when inflation was running at 12 per cent to make an example of them to other public-sector workers.

They never valued well-paid public servants, reneged on the pay review promises, and now we see the long-term result. Come off it Diana Wallis, my memory is long, so stop playing politics with the NHS!

John Simpson,

Geldof Road,

Huntington, York.

Updated: 10:13 Monday, September 10, 2001