Chancellor George Osborne is hailing the UK’s economic recovery in a keynote speech in Washington DC as we speak.

Mr Osborne said has critics of the government’s economic plan have been proved “comprehensively wrong”.

His chest-beating lap of honour after the International Monetary Fund said Mr Osborne’s austerity policies were “playing with fire”.

Speaking while in the US capital for the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, the chancellor said that cutting deficits and controlling spending had “laid the foundations for sustainable growth”.

There is still a prevailing view by certain politicians that running up a deficit in a NHS trust is simply due to inefficiency. This is to some extent, but ignores the considerable impact of the loan interest repayments in PFI hospitals.

I have often thought about whether the State should pay off its debts in one foul swoop, after all it had managed to bail the bankers by a tune of about £1 trillion?

Then my mind invariably turns to ‘credit’ and ‘blame’.

I think of how the last Labour government bit the bullet for this bank re-capitalism. They received no credit for it, and took the blame from David Cameron and Nick Clegg for ‘crashing the car’.

Except… Gordon Brown didn’t singlehandedly crash any car.

Chris Leslie MP, I suppose, has got completely fed up of touring the TV studios to explain it was a global recession, and not simply Gordon Brown’s fault.

Whenever a Coalition MP says the economy’s in a mess due to Labour, audible groans are now heard.

And yet people don’t especially trust Ed Balls MP or Labour “on the economy”.

For this to work, the general public has to separate away the abuse of employment rights and the cost of living through inflated privatised utility bills as separate from “the economy”.

And yet this Government is still borrowing like no tomorrow.

Whatever the explanation is, voters tend to prefer the Conservatives on the economy.

And the NHS likewise, under the mandates from all three political parties, has been pursuing ‘efficiency savings’. The money thus far has been returned to the Treasury, and where it went thereafter is far from clear.

So that is exactly the point.

The crashing of the economy by investment bankers has had many ordinary people taking the bullet, and yet, as the economy recovers, you can expect there to be no ‘let up’ on the tightening of the belt of the NHS finances.

And it’s been demonstrated time and time again that NHS funding has been falling in real terms in recent years.

For all the ‘thinking’ by think tanks, the methods for funding the NHS have become increasingly convoluted, when the vast majority of the general public wish for a NHS funded wholly out of general taxation, and wish to maintain a NHS which is comprehensive, universal and free at the point of need.

That you can also assume that disabled citizens won’t benefit from the recovery is a safe bet. Disabled citizens have become an invisible demographic for Labour, to the point that the Labour Party are embarrassed to soil their lips with their name.

I still believe any party which can show a clear vision for the NHS, in the week that has showed that the English NHS has fared the worst through full-frontal implementation of an internal market compared to other devolved regions, will ultimately succeed.

There was not a single clause in the Health and Social Care Act (2012) devoted to patient safety, together with its £3bn ‘top down reorganisation’.

I, in fact, tell a lie.

There is a clause abolishing the National Patient Safety Agency, supported vocally by some prominent patient campaigners for reasons best known to themselves.

All the experience is that understaffed NHS institutions are unsafe.

If Labour can’t capture the public mood over rejecting the current government’s approach to the NHS, it is in serious trouble. There’s only a year left for the Labour Party to get its ducks in line, and if it is unable to do so, it won’t win the General Election in 2015 regardless of Farage’s landslide in the European elections.