It’s perfectly possible to run a public service into the ground. Then say it’s shit. Then privatise it. Look at British Rail.

The NHS represents the ultimate golden goose. It is pictured as a drain of resources, while year after year it runs at super efficiency supposed to deliver cumulatively £20bn ‘efficiency savings’? And where does this money go? Answers on a postcard. It’s all a big scam, as the Government then consults on what could deliver better care: and after a few Cs, the answer is compassion. What a surprise.

If we had the same level of revolts as in Greece and Spain at this drive in the name of ‘austerity’, ‘sustainability’, or ‘doing more for less’, or any other trite saying which springs to mind, the number of people of arrested could in theory fill private prisons many times over. It doesn’t matter if some of these are ‘false arrests’, as an outsourcing company could run the appeals process for another arm of the outsourced criminal justice system. The State of course doesn’t have to pay for it having torpedoed legal aid. Look at what the criminal barristers are up to.

Guilty when you’re innocent is the legal equivalent of the ‘false positive’. It’s perfectly possible to rustle up false positives in many areas of medicine. Take for example finding the odd demyelinating plaque on a neuroimaging scan, which could then be further investigated by a lumbar puncture, to rule out multiple sclerosis. Or take for example a twang of musculoskeletal pain which gets combined with a borderline blood test result so that an individual ends up having a catheter inserted up his groin to have a look at the arteries in the heart.

The possibilities are endless. This is what goes wrong when you open up the wrong markets. There are many who disagree with the market ethos, and expect Labour to go through the motions of opposing the market. The question though can be asked what exactly it has been done to oppose the TTIP (EU-US Free Trade Treaty), when MPs have been extolling its virtues in other sectors. And does the Labour Party wish to chuck out those MPs or Lords who clearly have been alleged to have conflicts of interest affecting how they vote on matters of competition or procurement law?

Public anger at a cash-starved NHS might get Labour into government, but what happens when Labour comes into government? Certain things, such as the TTIP or European procurement directives) might suddenly come beyond the control of Labour. The ‘efficiency savings’ are set to continue. Will they do anything about the ‘efficiency savings’? Ed Balls yesterday boasted of ‘the Fabian way’, but the description he gave was very free-market with the NHS or socialism barely mentioned. It’s a moot point whether this is of course the ‘Fabian Way’, but the logo of the Fabians used to be a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’.

What would a unified budget mean for a combined NHS and social care service? Quite simply, it could become the second reincarnation of ‘The Big Society’. This concept was widely criticised as being a cover for cuts, but a means of legitimately ‘shrinking the state’. The two concepts have thus far not been explained well, although it’s still early days for ‘whole person care’. Merging the budgets could make it much easier to hide further under-resourcing of services. It is potentially a neoliberal shoo-horn, but in the maelstrom of the Labour Party acting as the caped crusader, nobody might notice.

And of course if work pays, private business pays even better. There’s still money to be made from people trapped in the system, if they are incorrectly charged with an offence or wrong diagnosed with a medical condition. If the Government wishes concomitantly to up the number of diagnoses in conditions, you could see the perfect storm, as in the national dementia policy. Things are normally charged on the basis of what it costs plus a bit of a profit, and of course the directors of private companies are obliged to return a porky shareholder dividend.

Yep, it’s the cash cow which keeps on giving. Who knows what Simon Stevens, ex head of a multinational, will make of it as head of the NHS this year.