I LOOK forward to reading the Advertiser each day. However, the paper of November 11 was not an easy read.

The front page tells us of the talk about merging Swindon and New College.

This is due to the crippling cuts in public funding and the need to find ways of supplying education more cheaply.

New College principal Graham Taylor said: “There have been 50 per cent cuts to the adult education in the last eight years and there’s going to be another 30 per cent in the next three years.

“About a quarter of colleges are in financial difficulties.”

Above this article is the headline “NHS sell-off continues as firms bid for adult services.”

Then further on I read about Lydiard Park. The council is planning to invite bids for the running of our public park to save on running costs.

You can read news of other cuts on a regular basis in our local paper.

I wonder how many other readers are as worried as I am.

Funding for the NHS comes directly from taxation. Colleges are funded by taxation. Lydiard Park has been paid for by the taxpayers of Swindon over many years.

So they all belong to us. That’s OUR education, OUR health and OUR leisure being targeted.

Just the latest in a long list of services.

So there we have it. Our assets being sold off, leased out or closed for maximum profit.

All of our services being eroded so that rich people can make more money.

I wonder when people are going to start protesting or are they just going to sit meekly by and watch the dismantling of their services?

And before people start writing in to say I wasn’t brought up properly and therefore don’t understand finances, let me add that my father was an accountant who paid his own way throughout his life and brought me up to do the same.

We have been lucky enough to have the health and opportunity to do so, and the good fortune to have free education and the NHS to care for us up to now.

This is not to do with reducing the deficit but to do with removing the welfare state, the NHS and public services.

People before profit, I say, and I will be fighting tooth and nail to try to defend that principle.

KATE LINNEGAR Guppy Street, Swindon