Our NHS on the brink

Staff shortages and lack of beds, hospitals full to overflowing - it's a terrifying reminder of the darkest days of the Thatcher government.

But there is far worse to come. Margaret Thatcher only tried to let the NHS die of neglect. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are actively trying to murder it.

The £20 billion of cuts forced on health trusts are just the first step. The hated Health and Social Care Act will hack the NHS into pieces.

The profitable parts get flogged off to ministers' friends in the private sector. As much as possible gets outsourced to those same fat cats. And a shabby underfunded rump NHS continues to stumble along until its reputation is bad enough that a future Tory government can get away with finishing it off entirely.

It's a deliberate plan to dismantle the NHS for the sake of private profit. To destroy the very idea that health care could and should be provided on the basis of need, not the ability to pay.

The Tories need to destroy the NHS because its very existence disproves all their talk of private-sector "efficiency."

The NHS is already a shining model of efficiency that puts most of the world - including the US - to shame.

Slicing up health care, marketising and privatising and outsourcing services means that we all pay far more and get far less. And the Con-Dems' fat-cat friends make out like bandits.

The Tories fear that voters will look at how well the state-run monopoly works and wonder what else should work that way. The railways, say. Energy, water, phones or any of the other services they handed over to shoddy profiteers.

The government has no mandate whatsoever for this assault. David Cameron contested the 2010 election on the basis of two barefaced lies - that he would not cut the NHS and that there would be no top-down reorganisation.

Nick Clegg too ran on a platform of protecting the NHS, not destroying it.

Their lies need to be exposed and the coalition brought down as soon as humanly possible.

But that's only the start. It was the free-market fanatics of new Labour who first opened the door to NHS privatisation.

Ed Miliband has spoken strongly against the Con-Dem attack on the NHS. But it remains a concern that he keeps Ed Balls, one of the architects of the disastrous PFI deals that have cost the NHS so much, as his shadow chancellor.

So when the coalition falls - and it surely is when, not if, now - we must take the fight for the NHS to Labour and pile the pressure on Miliband to match his tough talk with tough action to save our NHS.