We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

1. Private providers will have ‘rights’ to bid – although it’s hard to see any consumer-market mechanism at work when the criterion for appointment doesn’t seem likely to extend beyond “cheapest tender”.

2. They’ll cherrypick the most profitable bits of the service – leaving the taxpayer to continue funding the awkward unprofitable stuff – and once a service is in private hands then there’ll simply no longer be any public-provider capacity left to take it back in the event of underperformance.

(We are, with touching and somewhat uncharacteristic naivety, presenting such underperformance due to private-sector involvement as a mere possibility.)

3. The whole process becomes an ever-accelerating runaway train, on course for complete privatisation by unaccountable profit-driven corporations.

4. With the vast bulk of NHS expenditure then transferred off the UK public books, the Barnett formula comes into play and slashes the Scottish block grant by billions of pounds, far too much to be recouped by savings elsewhere, leaving the Scottish NHS no option but to privatise too.

If that’s all too abstract and you want a real-world example to compare, though, or if you just want to see whether Tory ideology is really any different to that of Labour, almost exactly the same thing has already happened in very recent memory to another (once-) precious British institution: the Royal Mail.

Two successive Labour governments – hiding behind a figleaf of EU law – hived off all the lucrative bits of the postal industry to the private sector in the early 2000s, leaving the core business with all the expensive loss-making bits. To cut costs we’ve subsequently seen a bonfire of Post Offices, tens of thousands of job losses, the end of the second post (which was in reality the end of the first post), threats to daily deliveries in rural areas and a swingeing 35% increase in the cost of a stamp.

The Tories are, as usual, continuing Labour’s work with enthusiasm. Desperate postal workers are on the verge of strike action against yet another round of closures, job losses and real-terms pay cuts, and the government has approved plans to sell up to 100% of the business to the private sector.

A service already measurably, visibly worse – yet more expensive – than it was just a decade ago will continue to decline in quality and increase in price, while largely foreign-owned companies take billions in profit out of the UK economy.

If you want to know what the UK’s NHS will look like ten years into the future, simply have a look at the coffee shop, nail salon or simply boarded-up empty property where your local sub-Post Office used to be, while you wait for your mail to arrive some time in the middle of the afternoon.

It’s not hard to see why Scotland’s posties support independence.