RUTH Davidson, leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, told the Scottish Nation that she wants to abolish universal free prescriptions in Scotland.

She would, however, keep free prescriptions for children, students, adults over 60, pregnant woman and people on income support. She is trying to sell us this Scrooge policy by saying she would use the savings to fund 1000 extra nurses and midwives. Here we have it again, the Tories attacking the working age population and especially those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. I have had several disabilities all my life, which I didn’t ask for. I have had pain most of my adult life, which again I didn’t ask for. I have depended on lots of pain medication, which surprisingly perhaps for some Tory Scrooges I did ask for. For that pleasure I had to pay £6 odd per item or £95 for a yearly ‘loyalty’ ticket, which meant I did not have to pay any more than £95. When I buy a car, a television, go on holiday or go out for a meal I do accept that I have to pay a tax for those luxuries. I have never been able to understand how medication could be seen as a luxury and thus see it as a tax on ill health/disability.

Presently, in Englandshire, sick and disabled citizens have to pay £8.10 per item on their prescription! The CAB will tell any politician that their statistics show many people on low incomes are just not collecting their prescriptions because they can’t afford them. Of course this is totally alien to the Tories who are mainly rich people who have only one aim in mind and that is to slowly break the welfare state at the cost of low paid/unemployed and disabled people.

Ms Davidson and her cronies in Westminster also are devious in exempting adults over 60, which by the way includes myself, from being charged the Bedroom Tax, which I totally abhor and actively fight against, and now also the proposed ill health tax by Ms Davidson. Her party keeps shouting the slogan “We’re all in it together” but then exempt automatically many very rich older adults from contributing to both taxes. This is known in politics as ‘protecting the grey vote’ because it is well know that older adults tend to vote more than younger ones and the Tories find a lot of their support in this age range. My last words on this are that there are many ways to get funding to pay for extra nurses and midwives, ie scrap Trident, stop tax evasion and tax avoidance, get the rich to pay just a penny in the pound extra on their income tax which would pay for their free prescriptions, bus passes, winter fuel payments, etc.

RUDI VOGELS (disAbility activist).