SIR – Our Tory-led coalition Government has rapidly made an art form out of deliberate manipulation and misinterpretation of its own data to suit its own purposes. So it comes as no surprise that Tory Harriett Baldwin MP (Worcester News, November 1) feels that she must promote the latest untruth, that concerning alleged “NHS tourism”.

She ought to know that, on the day after the report on which her comments were based appeared, evidence from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of York, using the Government’s own data, showed that twice as many foreigners pay to use the NHS as exploit free healthcare; and that, tellingly, the UK is a net exporter of patients seeking treatment.

In other words, we are net beneficiaries of international “health tourism”.

The Government’s own research shows that only between 5,000 and 20,000 people could be reasonably described as “health tourists”, costing, possibly, between £60 million and £80 million.

Compare and contrast this with the £300 million quoted in your piece, the “official”

government report of £2 billion and the £1.5 billion reported, ludicrously, by the Tory-supporting Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

They’ve got us where they want us: just as in post- Weimar Germany, scapegoats are made, and we are deliberately set up to turn against the other, the different and the not us.

We are an unhappy country, and it’s a sad lookout for a Europe blighted by wholly unnecessary austerity; and I am particularly distressed that my very dear old friend Peter Pinfield, chairman of Healthwatch, should be so easily taken in by it all.

DAVID BARLOW Worcester