Stuff of nightmares

The chairman of the village Parish Council, Gordon Campbell, picked Mr Branson as an example of just one possible outcome of the recent direction the National Health Service is being harried along by Westminster.

Private finance deals funding the building of hospitals and clinics which form - not an independent local 'service' - but just one insignificant branch of a massive 'Super Surgery' run, not by health professionals, but by business tycoons is the future of the NHS, whether we like it or not.

And those who question this development are swept aside by accusations of unrealistic idealism, slavish devotion to out-of-date political agendas and a failure to appreciate the benefits slick enterprise can heap upon an expensive, tired, creaky, socialist health monolith.

Since its inception, the National Health Service has been a large drain upon the nation's economy but it is only in the past 25 years that a gradual change of perception among politicians has come to regard that drain as unacceptably high.

Now private loans are used to provide doctors' surgeries, GPs are turned into profitable service providers, patients will become customers and money will be taken out of the public purse - leaving less and less left over for services.

Far from being short-sighted die-hard reactionaries, critics of the privatisation of the NHS in Addingham or anywhere else, may be the only ones who can see through the brick walls of a brand new building.

If there wasn't enough money for new buildings in the first place without going to private banks, just imagine the situation 20 years from now.