GILL George, who lives in Ludlow, heads the group campaigning to save the NHS in Shropshire.

She believes that we need a national debate on priorities including the future of the NHS.

The problem is that there will never be enough money for the NHS as it will always be possible to spend more.

An almost continuous improvement in treatment as new drugs and surgical techniques are developed is combined with an ageing population that makes ever greater demands upon the service.

When the service was first introduced in the late 1940s, it was much simpler because there were fewer drugs and treatments available and on average people only lived a few years after they retired and stopped paying into the system.

Now it is very different and even with people working longer and the end of the formal retirement age, on average people can easily expect to live 20 years or more on average after they stop paying in.

There are also complex questions about priorities and if such as cosmetic surgery or even infertility treatments should be available on the NHS.

So Gill is probably right in that there is a need for a proper informed debate so that, as a country, we can determine a set of parameters and priorities.

Until the ‘money tree’ is invented there will always only be so much to go round and on June 23 this year we voted to make ourselves as a nation and future generations poorer in the future so it is time to decide how what resources are available are spent.

This is still a relatively wealthy country although there is little doubt that self-inflicted financial difficulties will flow from the Brexit vote.

But key questions need to be asked such as should we be spending money on the NHS that is currently earmarked for the Trident nuclear weapons system.

A big question is how do we hold the debate and reach the decisions because 2016 will go down as the year in which a Rubicon was crossed and a genie let out of the bottle.

In the past, the way things have been done is that we have political parties that put forward a platform including spending priorities and we vote for them at general elections, usually every few years.

But now all of that has been changed with the EU referendum in which the power was passed directly to the people to make a key decision that will affect our economic and foreign policy for decades.

The referendum may have had nothing to do with a desire to devolve more power directly to the people but was about a mechanism for David Cameron to get his own Europhobes off his back that went horribly wrong. This being another example of the ‘law of unintended consequences'.

But the fact is that now people have been given a direct vote on something as important as EU membership it is hard to argue that they should not be given a vote on issues like the future of the NHS, the welfare state and defence policy including nuclear weapons.

The thing with genies is that once out of the bottle it is very difficult if not impossible to put them back.