HEALTH Minister Hazel Blears seems to have lost the plot by attacking MP James Gray for his defence of Malmesbury Hospital.

Mr Gray presented to the House of Commons a petition signed by 2,300 residents from Malmesbury and surrounding villages protesting at the Kennet and North Wiltshire Primary Care Health Trust's possible closure of Malmesbury Hospital.

Yet in the Commons Ms Blears attacked the MP for not providing the "necessary support" for the health trust.

The simple justification for Mr Gray not supporting the health trust is because of its scarcely disguised enthusiasm for shutting Malmesbury's hospital or slashing its services.

If that wasn't a good enough reason for Mr Gray to withhold his support, Ms Blears seemed indifferent to Malmesbury's plight when the MP met her to discuss the hospital's future.

The health trust is nothing more than an extension of the Labour Government.

My wife and I have written to the trust proposing that, before it considers shutting facilities such as Malmesbury Hospital, it should reduce the level of its administrators to that in the private health sector, i.e. one administrator to nine medical staff.

Yet of all the options the trust floats for reducing expenditure, none includes cuts in the number of bureaucrats.

Curious? Not at all. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are intent on extending the public sector in the certain knowledge that its employees are more likely to vote Labour than those in the private sector who pay the public sector's salaries.

As our economy totters under the weight of public spending and, from April 6 increased direct taxation, the private sector is taking the axe to its workforce.

The national media is full of announcements of redundancies. When did the public sector ever cut its workforce?

In the 1970s Ford slashed seven layers of management and produced better cars.

In the 1990s the electricity industry was put into private hands and subsequently more than half its staff were made redundant. Today, electricity is cheaper in real terms than it was before privatisation.

Will Barbara Smith, the chief executive of the health trust, take the axe to the administrators and bureaucrats in her part of the NHS where, according to recent reports, about half of all staff are non-medical? You can bet she won't.

But she'll ensure that, through our taxes, we pay for a shelter at her headquarters so her administrators smoke cigarettes protected from the wind and rain.

While the NHS is now the world's largest employer outside the Republic of China and local facilities such as Malmesbury Hospital face the axe, doctors complain, just as in Lenin's Soviet Union, administrators working to political dictates are usurping medical judgements.

The Labour Government and its health quangos have had six years to solve these problems. They don't understand the public sector ethos they laud is incapable of delivering efficient and cheap services.

As one of our relatives remains under the care of Miss Smith's health trust, we will be grateful if you would withhold our names and address.

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