An open letter to Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party and the MPs for Bolton North-East, South-East and West.

If you are serious about changing Britain for the better, here are some suggestions which I think you will find the majority of the British people would like to see.

It’s just that politicians love to hear themselves speak and want to be “on message”, showing that they listen to the public, but in reality they do not.

l The National Health Service: A guarantee from Labour it will not privatise any part of the NHS.

It will reinstate all services privatised back under the control of the area health authorities, which includes cleaning, laundry and maintenance, ensure that the Trans-Atlantic Trade Agreement with America excludes the NHS so that they cannot privatise it.

Do away with prescription charges as they only represent one per cent of the cost of running the NHS and penalise the poor in work and the shrinking middle class.

l The economy: Bring in a living wage, increase taxation on the one per cent of extremely rich people, bring in legislation that will send bankers to prison instead of making the poor pay.

Reduce taxation on businesses that pay the full tax in this country, refuse to give contracts to any company that is not registered in this country for tax purposes.

l Housing: Guarantee to build one-and-a-half million houses for social needs in the life of the Parliament; councils should be in charge of all social housing.

This could be done through the construction of factory-built houses to be erected on brownfield sites where possible.

l Energy: Stop messing about with price freezes, bring back into public ownership gas, electricity and water.

l Transport: Trains and buses should be taken back into public ownership and run as services for the people; scrap HS2 and spend £20 billion on repairing our roads, saving everybody in the country money by reducing repair costs.

l Education: University fees should be abolished or at least reduced; taking your children out of school for a fortnight’s holiday should not be a criminal offence.

These measures will transform this country.

Has the Labour Party got the vision to change Britain? I don’t think so.

I think Labour now has more in common with the Conservative Party and it will not have vision or the determination to fundamentally change our society for the better.

It will try the same policies as the present Government and end up destroying both the working class and middle class for the benefit of the rich one per cent.

Ian Greenhalgh Smithills