TONIGHT, together with the Nottinghamshire Ex and Retired Miners Association, I will be holding a press conference to publicise the “999 Call for the NHS” march which will go through Nottinghamshire in August and arrive at Westminster in early September. 

The protest march, organised by local mothers in Jarrow, takes its inspiration in part from the 1936 Jarrow March.

The truth is that privatisation has already cut away at the heart and quality of the NHS. 

The government has a clear and cynical strategy to gradually privatise the health service in order to minimise the public outrage it faces. 

However constituents are already coming to me distraught that they are being advised they will receive the same treatment from the same doctor, but they will receive it sooner if they pay for the privilege. 

Creeping privatisation reaches from one treatment to another — first addiction treatment, then obesity, then smoking. 

It is a scandal being replicated up and down the country and the modern marchers from Jarrow are right to call for it to be stopped. 

Last week Nottinghamshire County Council voted to support the march. Every Labour councillor voted in favour of a motion which praised the march for highlighting “the privatisation of the NHS which has seen profitable parts of the NHS transferred into private hands while leaving the public purse to carry the cost of expensive and complex operations.” 

The problem with this is that it opens politicians up to that most common accusation — double standards. 

It is all very well for Labour politicians to support marches and pass resolutions, but it is action that counts. 

And only the week before their motion was unanimously voted through, Nottinghamshire County Council’s public health committee had pushed ahead with privatisation of public health in Nottinghamshire. 

It does sound too bizarre to be true. One week, in the face of opposition from GPs, health workers, service users and local residents, the council privatises a key health service. The next it votes to “support” an anti-privatisation march. 

I am fighting this privatisation tooth and nail alongside the NHS workers who are disputing the consultation and tendering process, which focused not on quality of treatment but on the council’s aim of cutting its short-term costs as quickly as possible.

Those with drug and alcohol problems will now not receive treatment from their GP or specialist NHS healthcare workers, but from Crime Reduction Initiatives. 

CRI markets itself as a charity, but according to its latest accounts, out of a total income of £99,817,000 last year only £36,000 came from charitable donations. 

Coincidentally, it spent exactly the same amount, £36,000, on “auditing fees.” It also has £14 million in the bank having made a “surplus” of £2.2m last year.

CRI, which also plans to take over privatised probation services in Nottinghamshire, has as its chair of trustees a Mr David Gregson. 

As he is also chairman of the Lawn Tennis Association, Gregson must be uniquely placed to have a view on how patients in my constituency should be medically treated, as well as how to run the local probation service.

This is the antithesis of everything the Labour Party stands for and we must oppose it at every level. 

However it will also force us to understand that in some ways politicians must relinquish their control over health treatment. 

Many of my colleagues in Parliament like to believe that they are the experts on most topics, but on health most must admit that they cannot possibly be more knowledgeable than doctors and health workers. 

I am yet to meet a constituent who, when faced with an illness, would come to see me or a councillor as opposed to their doctor. 

The Labour Party has to show that it will end this meddling, and it can start by simply agreeing that those who work in the NHS know best. 

Why should local politicians, with no medical training, decide how local people are treated for their addictions? 

How can it possibly be fair for politicians to deny people access to their trusted GP and inform them that they will now be have to be treated by a private company called Crime Reduction Initiatives? 

Part of the issue is that if patients are made to feel like criminals, they are less likely to access treatment. 

Many of these are ex-army. Let me tell you about one. He was a lifelong soldier, a sergeant and in his later years a bit too fond of his whisky. 

There was no GP treatment for alcohol available in Scotland and he ended up incapable of living in his council house and had to move into a hostel for old soldiers. 

I visited him there, seeing him in his bunk bed alongside lots of other old soldiers who could not manage any more on their own. Does anyone seriously think that this proud lifelong soldier would seek help from a “crime reduction organisation?” 

Accessing healthcare is not something that we should be made to feel ashamed of. It should be seen as a basic right and one which those who are most vulnerable in our society should be able to use discreetly and effectively. 

At the same time, the NHS has to be accountable and adaptable and responsive to the communities that it operates in. The Labour Party has to fight the falsehood that the private sector is the answer to the future of innovative healthcare. 

For the Labour Party to safeguard the NHS, it has to refrain from meddling in healthcare. 

We should trust health professionals and simultaneously reverse the coalition’s attacks on the NHS which have allowed a swarm of money-making amateurs to take over treatment up and down the country. 

Aneurin Bevan said that the NHS will survive as long as there are people prepared to fight for it. 

The Labour Party can and must be part of that fight, and keep public health services across the country within the NHS. 

John Mann is Labour MP for Bassetlaw.