FURTHER attacks upon NHS services in Wirral have provoked a huge public backlash.

Following a mass lobby of Wirral’s Labour-controlled council, public meetings, and a petition that has attracted over 4,000 signatures, the council has unanimously backed a motion opposing plans to shut five walk-in centres and minor injury units in Eastham, Wallasey, Birkenhead, New Ferry, and Moreton.

All of the people using those services, including the elderly, disabled, and children, would have to face a trek to Arrowe Park Hospital if the closures go ahead. Wirral’s Clinical Commissioning Group, local arm of NHS England, has adopted doublespeak language that would not be out of place in George Orwell's novel 1984 to justify the closures.

They claim Wirral residents are "confused about where to get help with urgent care," and that concentrating all such care at Arrowe Park Hospital will "move care closer to home!!"

Such gobbledegook is, unsurprisingly, having the opposite effect of that intended by the Government’s local hatchet men and women.

These are cuts, impure and simple, and the people of Wirral are rightly up-in-arms about them.

Wirral’s four Labour MPs have, as usual, been conspicuously absent from the vanguard of protests.

James Roberts, Wallasey