In between elections, some of the electorate leave it up to Polly Toynbee to construct a forensic dissection of the section 75 Regulations on competition and choice in the NHS, or park a discussion of inequality at the foot of a major tome on the subject by Thomas Piketty.

The Guardian readers of North London therefore pride themselves on their immaculate understanding of their world. They occupy the tents of St. Paul’s Cathedral, or protest about tax on Oxford Street.

Who’d then have thunk of a novel way of influencing democracy through the good old-fashioned ballot box?

It sometimes seems that every cappuccino sipping intelligentsia fluent in every investor protection clause of TTIP can lay the blame of every evil at Andy Burnham’s door, without offering anything constructive to help Labour run the National Health Service from May 8th 2015.

If there’s a protest vote to be had, it should go to the nice anti-establishment man who went to a minor public school.

You can’t simply get enough of him on Question Time, LBC, or the Andrew Marr Show.

Just a pity you have absolutely no idea what UKIP stands for, in terms of the National Health Service.

The arithmetic might easily work out that UKIP come first with the Conservatives third, with the Labour Party coming second. Then it won’t matter that Andy Burnham MP has just returned from Strasbourg to try to negotiate some exclusions for us for the EU-US trade treaty.

It won’t even matter that Jeremy Hunt MP has failed to bring the long-awaited reform of clinicians, at Draft Bill Stage from the English Commission to combat scenarios such as Mid Staffs, before parliament.

Can it really be that the NHS is a spectator sport for the general public, where anyone who talks about the NHS is some crackpot, fringe ‘special interest’ group?

Isabel Hardman writing in the Spectator on 20 September 2013:

“Paul Nuttall MEP is about as different a Ukipper as you can get from Nigel Farage. He’s a bald Liverpuddlian, for starters. This means he can appeal to a different section of the electorate, and one that as Fraser said earlier, Farage needs to attract. He told the conference that Labour voters are ‘easy pickings’, adding:

‘It’s clear now ladies and gentlemen that Ukip is now the official opposition to Labour in the North of England.’”

The usual defence for atypical UKIP opinions is that every party is choc-a-bloc with wackos and nuts, so any extreme, offensive opinions are to be tolerated – an argument used at full throttle from Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, this morning on “The Andrew Marr Show”.

But clearly Nuttall believes in what he is saying. Besides, Paul Nuttall is the UKIP MEP for North West England, UKIP Deputy Leader.

Paul Nuttall MEP indeed talks about the NHS, or rather the privatisation of it, with great fondness:

“I would like to congratulate the coalition government for bringing a whiff of privatisation into the beleaguered National Health Service. The fact that successive governments have undertaken what they call ‘substantial’ changes to the NHS should tell us all we need to know: there is something fundamentally wrong with how we treat the ill in our country.”

“Beleaguered” in what sense?  Possibly he means the NHS is at ‘death’s door’ having had its reputation totally destroyed by the UK media.

Or maybe he means that spending for the NHS actually fell in real terms last year, as has been pointed out in a letter to Jeremy Hunt by Andrew Dilnot CBE much to the disgust of the current Government.

“The NHS is the second biggest employer in the world, beaten only by Walmart, but as with all state monopolies, it is costly, inefficient and stuffed with bureaucrats. In New Labour’s NHS, for every nurse there is a manager and vital workers, such as midwives, are falling in numbers.”

Except the NHS, prior to privatisation, has been considered to be one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world.

“The problem, however, goes far deeper. I would argue that the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and choice, innovation and improvements are restricted.”

Ah – that wonderful policy plank called ‘competition’, the poster boy of neoliberalism, which has been one of the biggest disasters in English health policy ever, and which has even been called “killing the NHS“.

This is no time for hyperbole, of course.

“Therefore, I believe, as long as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British people will suffer with a second rate health service.”

If the NHS is a sacred cow, it is possibly about to sacrificed at the altar of a UKIP-Tory coalition.