“The past is a different country. They did things differently there.’

One of the favourite weapons in the armoury of supporters of the present Coalition is that the warning claims over the NHS have been in the past ‘exaggerated’ or ‘scaremongering’.

And yet today broke records being broken, for the longest waits in the Accident and Emergency departments in England; and a record number of emergency admissions.

The National Health Service currently has a statutory duty to promote innovation. But nobody would have thought that Mr. Hunt (who is not a professional surgeon, or professional medic, to my knowledge) would have ‘done things differently'; by adding a ‘Spring Crisis’, ‘Summer Crisis’ and ‘Autumn Crisis’ to a ‘Winter Crisis’.

Put simply, sadly the claims by NHS supporters do not constitute merely ‘scaremongering’. It may have been urgent to ‘save the NHS’ in the past; as indeed Labour had to do in 2007 when the service was teetering on the brink last time. But the situation is now critical.

The last few years have seen a litany of errors in public health policy; such as in standard packaging of cigarettes, or minimum pricing of alcohol. It has been impossible for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, who are both devoted to the multinational free movement of capital, to act in the true public interest.

But by far the worst event to have happened were the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats getting onto the state books the ‘Health and Social Care Act’.

The Liberal Democrats’ contribution to this statutory instrument cannot be underestimated by any means. Despite the noblest actions of a minority of ‘good LibDems’, such as Dr Charles West, the cheap words of some LibDems Peers in the debate over the toxic ‘section 75′ made their position perfectly clear.

Section 75 of ‘the Lansley Act’, which senior Conservatives now claim not to have understood, couldn’t have been clearer. It was a clear departure from the previous law. It laid out a clear threat in law for the first time a legal threat to any commissioners departing from putting contracts out to formal competitive tender, if there were not a sole bidder.

The Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and UKIP may now show what can best be described as ‘amnesia’ over this instrument which some of them actually legislated for, as well as the £3bn ‘top down reorganisation’ which David Cameron swore blind would never be introduced, but “the facts speak for themselves”: or, as my learned legal colleagues, put it, ‘res ipsa loquitur’.

Andy Burnham MP this morning in an article in the New Statesman laid bare the sheath of lies by Nick Clegg in the House of Parliaments over the NHS.

Sadly, while Jeremy Hunt and Dan Poulton fiddle while the NHS collapses, there is a record number of admissions in emergency departments in England, and the most vulnerable people are labelled ‘bed blockers’ by a supine and ineffective English media as they cannot leave hospital to a social care system which has now collapsed through starvation.

Labour argues that it last used the private sector in needing to address a ‘backlog’ in demand, but the question is how the NHS get to this state in the first place? It’s because for decades, as NHS campaigners rightly argue, the NHS and social care systems have been given the bare minimum to carry out their functions.

NHS managers, many of whom are generously paid more than their ability might suggest, and certainly much more than frontline nurses implementing a policy savaged by staffing cuts in the name of ‘efficiency savings’, have been trying to balance the books through a number of mechanisms, such as laying off staff, not giving existent staff a pay rise, or paying corporates loan repayments for PFI or lawyers for doing their administration.

Labour possibly can argue then it was a temporary measure to pay off people in the private sector to do the work the NHS had been carrying out, but the mainstream parties should be in the business of delivering a well functioning NHS. As Andy Burnham MP said in launching his party’s campaign on the NHS in the European Election in 2014, we’ve got a sad state when the Conservatives and LibDems are competing for the lowest social care bills irrespective of whether the services are awful.

And it’s sacracant to criticise the NHS managers, but any reasonable guardian of these managers will ask why they have allowed their own senior pay to balloon;

why performance management of Doctors and nurses in the NHS is so poor, with performance management being regularly done by the regulator not by human resources;

why so much money has been siphoned off for ‘transaction costs’ of law and admin the implement the NHS reforms;

why PFI contracts have been so poorly negotiated such that the cost to the State is enormous;

how come so many private providers are being directly paid out of the NHS monies provided by taxpayers;

why there seems to be an enthusiasm to pay short-term locum staff at exorbitant rates instead of investment in the current workforce;

and so on?

The Health and Social Care Act (2012) drove the NHS over the edge. Put simply, the NHS and social care systems would not be able to survive another sudden legislative mechanism designed to privatise the NHS?

On this Camilla Cavendish is simply incorrect. You would have thought with all her experience she should have come up with a better definition of ‘privatisation’ on BBC Question Time last night. it is the standard argument of those who say it is not privatisation to say that privatisation is accompanied by a ‘tell Sid’ type flotation (also called the “initial public offering’).

It is not.

Privatisation is simply wholesale transfer of assets and resources from the public sector to the private sector.

There has been every possible last-ditch effort to deny this was NHS privatisation from the current neoliberal Coalition parties. It is definitely privatisation. The taxpayer is paying private companies for functions which the State should be providing, without private companies footing properly their part of the ‘bill’ including for training of the current workforce of professionals.

The ratcheting up of how ‘it is not privatisation’ or ‘we should look at whether private provision is a bad thing’ is a testament to this.

Quite simply, the NHS would not survive another five years of the Conservatives. We should rally around NHS campaigners of all parties to ensure the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are not re-elected nationally to run the NHS for their benefit.

The National Health Service is not supposed to be run for the benefit of private sector ‘rent seekers’, or MPs who also have interests in the private health industry. Keep our NHS public. Keep the NHS National run for the public good.

Support your NHS campaigner. He or she needs you.