Absolutely spot on – and although Labour are trying hard to keep this boiling over, the problem Miliband has is that Blair pushed through privatisation of sections the NHS previously.
This allows the coalition to shout back “You did the same!” and takes the sting out of Labours point.. just as Evil Clegg repeatedly did the other day at Dept PMQs.

No one seems to pick up on the small fact that someone else doing something wrong previously is no justification to do it again.

Imagine if the rioters could have used the same excuse..

I very much hope you’re right.This bill is arrogant in the extreme and assumes that the public are idiots who are so distracted by X Factor and Heat magazine that they won’t notice the decline in their healthcare standards. Labour need to make the point loudly that the Coalition are attempting to insult our intelligence by pushing it through. That now is the time to stop taking the NHS for granted.

Fwiw I wrote to my Labour MP about it the other day, no doubt he is already against the bill but it doesn’t hurt to remind him that his constituents know/care about it.

Still waiting for firm commitment from Labour to overturn every aspect of the stupid NHS Bill (and also Welfare Reform Bill). Why do Labour wait to see how the wind is blowing before they decide what there policy is on everything? They are so scared of being seen a for the working class, or for claimants, or for the poor, that they have ended up rudderless and shadowing, mimicking and re-enforcing the Condems.

The Opposition should be promising an Inquiry into how Lansley has acted: instituting reforms before the Act has Royal Assent, twisting the arms of GPs to implement reforms by threatening them with take-over by private companies if they don’t implement reforms ahead of the Royal Assent, railroading MPs to accept the Bill because it has laready been partially implemented.

Its become very obvious now that Cameron doesn’t believe in the bill himself, and nor do many of his colleagues. He is soldiering on with it through a mixture of vanity and weakness. Politically, they believe they can’t afford to admit what a dog’s breakfast Lansley has cooked up, so they’re going to try and push it through anyway.

Now remember that if and when the predicted disasters come to pass. Remember it when the human costs of these “reforms” see the light of day.

The effects of this bill should be hung round the Tories’ necks forever.

I have said this consistently since the White Paper was published (and I said it before the election, after I had read the Tories’ NHS Autonomy and Accountability policy document) the Tories cannot win on the NHS and it will be their downfall. By going for such a big upheaval they are making matters worse for them.

Tory NHS reform should always have been a second term policy: “fix the economy then fix the NHS” should have been Tory mantra. They are doing neither, of course, but at least they could say at the next election “we didn’t realise how bad the economy way, but we did try”. They won’t be able to say this about the NHS.

Further, and worse, Cameron and Lansley have politicised many people through their cack-handed NHS policy. This means that at the next election they’ll find some very conservative (small c) people saying that it was a disaster to allow the Tories to get anywhere near the NHS. It took four elections for normally non-political people to realise that the Tories had to go, Cameron has managed this in half a parliament, and that is due to the NHS reforms.

It’ll either be a waterloo for the coalition or for every British human. Lets hope its the latter.

(English human I should say)

Masu. Labour used the private sector mainly to reduce waiting times, to supplement NHS services rather than to replace them.

Michael Portillo said on ‘This Week’ some months ago that the Tories didn’t tell us of their plans for the NHS during the election campaign because they knew they wouldn’t have been elected if they had. Not that they were elected, of course. I hope that anyone tempted to vote for the Lib Dems in future, either from conviction or tactically, will remember how they’ve not only allowed Lansley to proceed with his plans but have supported him in the lobbies.

I wish that Labour would make more of what is really behind this legislation. It’s payback time for those private healthcare firms which have bankrolled the Tories to the tune of at least £750 million since Cameron became their leader, and which even contributed to Lansley’s private office.

Labour need to say they will reverse any changes to the NHS. I can still remember the ever longer waiting lists for operations during 18 years of tory governments.

I’m not really sure that the polls do support the idea that Health is a growing weakness for the Conservatives. The YouGov tracker shows that most of the drop for the Tories as the Party best able to handle the ‘problem’ of the NHS happened before 2011 and before when Lansley machinations had begun to be noticed (certainly before the current Bill appeared).

Most people don’t work in Health and/or take and interest in how the NHS is organised. For them the changes are suspicious but incomprehensible. It may well have the potential to undermine trust in the Conservatives, particularly as they are depending heavily on their support among their over-60s, but it hasn’t happened yet.

As for Labour their support is also lower on Health than it has been – in the mid-30s. Only ‘none of them’ is a consistent gainer. This is partly because Lansley is only following a slightly more extreme version of the previous government’s policies. For Labour to regain trust on the NHS it first has to apologise for the direction it took it in, rather than pretending that under them the NHS was some sort of lost Eden.

It also has to fight harder against what is being proposed. Even easy targets such as the vast amount of money Lansley has already wasted on these ‘reforms’ are being missed.

Labour need to say they will reverse any changes to the NHS.

They have. Or at least Andy Burnham has said he’ll reverse as much as possible. It would be irresponsible to say they’ll commit to reversing everything since reversing some of it would push NHS through another costly and tearing upheaval…