Letter to the Editor: As a surgeon — now retired— I learnt to be wary of anyone who was so sure they knew best that they were completely unable to view any issue from another’s viewpoint. Blinded by their own prejudice, they invariably got things wrong. In politics, people on the Left seem most prone to this; they simply can’t or wont accept that those of a different political persuasion may care just as passionately about public services. (Roger Louvet, Letters, Cambrian News, 23 November). So, any questions or concerns or ideas that don’t fit their narrative get shouted down. The real shame is that it stifles debate.

Immigration in the noughties was a classic example; anyone who dared raise a concern was derided as a racist, when in fact they had perfectly legitimate worries about housing, schools, healthcare etc.

Take the NHS for another example; infamously Ed Milliband decided that the Labour Party should “weaponise” it.

The idea of working in a weaponised health care system was appalling, leave alone being treated by it. What most of us want is a good NHS. And those of us who really care about the NHS know that the most important thing is that we can fund great healthcare, available to all, regardless of their financial wherewithal. Nothing more, and nothing less (and please note it isn’t free; it actually costs a lot of money). That means funding it not just now, but for our children and grandchildren.

Financially healthcare is a victim of its own success; we all live longer as a result of better healthcare so we consume more. So just “sharing the pie more fairly” is guaranteed to fail.  It will level down. It explains why we can’t afford to give our nurses a decent pay rise.

For the retirees like me to just extract money from the working young, so that we are OK, and to hell with the next generation, is grossly unfair.

But then socialism is all about pulling the ladder up behind you. Just look at the Labour grandees who sent their kids to selective/private schools, whilst busily telling the rest of us how wrong it was.

I have no doubt that Roger Louvet means well, but based on a partially overheard private conversation he concludes that all entrepreneurs are wicked. I am not an entrepreneur. I have come to (farming) business late in life due to a stroke of fate.

Sometimes I wonder whether if I had been an entrepreneur I would have contributed more to society than I may have done as an NHS surgeon.

I have the pleasure of working closely with many local entrepreneurs; these men and women have strived hard to build up their own business, paying their tax and most importantly of all creating jobs (generating yet more tax revenue).

I admire such people. Our public services depend on their ambition, sweat and toil, and those of us who receive a state pension, benefits or an income from a government paid job would do very well to remember it.

Welsh Government figures state that the average full time salary in Wales is £28,568. The Which Tax Calculator confirms that someone on that salary pays £5,761 in Tax and NI, or 20 per cent of their income. Presumably that “pays for themselves” — ie they contribute what they take out over their lifetime. (If that’s not true, then the system will inevitably go bust.)

Now consider someone lucky enough to be on 10 times the average salary (as a result of their hard work and entrepreneurship that the Left hate so much): they pay £123,494 in Tax and NI, 43 per cent of their income and 21 times more that the person on an average salary, and that is before the recent tax rises.

I am not sure that any right-minded person sees that as “trickle down”; it’s more like a torrent of financial help in which one hard-working person pays the costs of 20 other people. To add to it, they have probably created jobs for other people too.

This is how a successful country that wants to be able to afford great public services works.

It’s a free country, so if those on the Left want to cut off their noses to spite their faces, so be it. But people who really value the NHS and other public services may not want to join this ideological “levelling down”. They will respect the hard-working businessmen and women for the benefits they bring to society and the wealth they create and quietly celebrate the tax revenues which they generate for all of our benefit.

And they probably won’t trust handing over the NHS to idiot politicians who want to “weaponise” it for their own selfish ends.

And just for the record, I was criticising Quantitative Easing from the moment Gordon Brown kicked it off in 2008. Printing funny money was always going to lead to rampant inflation.

The chickens have come home; they always do.

Patrick Loxdale,

Chairman,

Ceredigion Conservative Association,

Llanilar