I’m pretty certain that George Osborne is actually quite a nice guy.

I know of people who know people who’ve had dealings with him on a chat-chat level. And apparently he’s perfectly harmless.

George Osborne’s one job was to run the UK economy. And he’s failed at that.

The LibDems had a job to deliver to deliver ‘a strong economy and fair society’. Add in the murder of English legal aid, we can confidently say the LibDems failed on their side of the bargain.

It doesn’t matter which particular metric you wish to use. The only good soundbites came from the rose garden soundbites from the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2010 informing us of the shiny uplands.

But it turns out that the incline of the uplands was steeper than we first thought. Osborne kept on telling us this was due to the Eurozone crisis. This is the same Eurozone crisis which has suddenly disappeared with one us being one of the ‘best performing economies’ in the G20.

Osborne’s pitch is that he needs just a little more time, as the famous Reet Petite song goes. He needs to ‘finish the job’ to put the UK back ‘on the path to prosperity’. This is the “long term economic plan”.

Except… the long term economic plan is not working. A record number apparently in employment with really bad income from as receipts? How did that happen?

Was it something, perhaps, to do with a record number on low security “zero hour contracts”, topped up with tax credits, who do not end up paying much income to the State?

The Conservative (Ronald Reagan) doctrine of a small state is creepy. The drastic diet of an ‘over bloated’ State has left a State which is anorexic – and which is dangerously fragile.

The Coalition’s anorexic state is consequently far from resilient. Most reasonable people agree that the anorexic State would simply be unable to cope with the Conservatives’ further planned cuts in the next term of office.

This is not the “shock doctrine” of Greece. It is a reality of something happening in the UK not seen since the 1930s.

The current Government has successfully relaunched the ‘duty of candour’. The duty of candour, about being open in the NHS when a mistake is made, already existed in the regulatory codes of the clinical professionals.

And again – it’s not actually the legal instrument as drafted which is the main problem (though there are problems here). It’s whether anyone is observing them properly: see for example ‘wilful neglect’ (section 44 Mental Capacity Act), national minimum wage, or deprivation of liberty safeguards.

Osborne does not want to come even close for apologising for the record debt, the colossal borrowing, the poor living standards, or the fact that his plan to pay off the deficit has been tragically bad.

I don’t know whether this is a pride thing, but in the real world it has a knock on effect for whether you can pay for health and care. We know the social care budget has been on its knees for years.

Many NHS Trusts are in deficit. This can’t be due to the nurses, most of whom have not experienced a pay rise for years. It may be due to the salaries of top CEOs in the NHS who have to ‘deliver’ on metrics which do not necessarily reflect high quality care (e.g. the ‘four hour wait’). Or it could be due to paying off the loan prepayments for PFI under successive governments.

I really like members of the NHS campaigning parties, but discussions about the NHS have to be linked with the discussions of the state of the economy. It’s an elephant in the room.

Likewise, for all of the slagging off of the Efford Bill, I can guarantee that the statutory instrument UKIP would like to introduce would be far more controversial.

UKIP at least do entertain a discussion on leaving Europe and European law, sort of, even if they do not have any plans for the UK economy.

The Efford Bill was seen in some quarters as ‘the trojan horse for privatisation’, and I can see how interpretation of the clauses might result in this conclusion. I think a problem the Efford Bill was ‘reverse engineering’ to comply with EU competition law – i.e. clauses which perhaps sound as if they’re providing exemptions from EU law, but nobody actually knows.

Not even the best legal minds in the country, of which I am not one, know.

But the EU is founded on free movement of people. Tick – I remember working as a junior in NHS hospitals in London, and simply the day to day operations of these Trusts would have been impossible without the hard work of staff nurses predominantly from India and the Philippines.

And it is also founded on free movement of capital.

There is a genuine feeling of ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ for NHS campaigners in NHAP and Keep our NHS Public. They certainly want to go to a NHS inspired by Nye Bevan which had never heard of section 75 or TTIP.

But it is impossible to have this debate in the absence of a discussion of Europe. It’s impossible to have a debate on the NHS in the absence of a wider debate on the economy.

Russell Brand and Nigel Farage may be grandstanding, but on the face of it they seem to be coming from different places, and with huge followings.

This all matters as it is highly unlikely a Labour-UKIP coalition could be made to work on the NHS, given we know such little about what accommodations UKIP might make on EU competition law or the economy.

We don’t know whether UKIP supports ‘efficiency savings’ however.

All of this is not a leading to a conclusion of ‘Vote Labour’. Labour has not overtly apologised for some thorny apsects of NHS policy, in the same way that Osborne has not apologised over the economy. But it does seem to have apologised for a lot – like letting the market in too far – but curiously not PFI?

I am particularly mindful that there are some ‘real’ experts in NHS policy who are far more experienced and wiser than me. I am also in strong admiration of campaigners wherever they hail from; many of whom have experience of seeing patients regularly.

I never see patients unless they’re friends of mine; and that’s purely for social reasons.

But the next Government’s policy on the NHS will be severely affected by the mistakes of the current Government, part of which ironically has a catchphrase ‘strong economy, fair society’.