WOULD-BE MP for York Central Rachael Maskell says she is a strong voice for York Central.

If so, I hope it will be an accurate one. Her leaflets say she has spent her working life in the NHS, though of course her last job was head of health at the trade union Unite.

Ms Maskell talks about wanting to save the NHS from the Conservatives. Since its founding there have been far more years of Conservative control than Labour and in every year, of all of those governments absolute and real spending has gone up. That hardly looks like a party wanting to destroy it.

Ms Maskell says she wants to save the NHS from privatisation. She has ignored my questions about what this means. I assume she is happy to keep drugs from private companies, GP practices which are all private and have private companies build our hospitals.

Perhaps she mean outsourcings? In which case why it was fine for the Labour government to outsource 4.4 per cent of NHS spend to private companies, but 5.9 per cent under the coalition is wrong – a decline in the rate of growth? Or is she just “weaponising” the NHS as Ed Miliband advised?

Cllr Chris Steward, Leader, York Conservative group, City of York Council.