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FAREWELL to the NHS, 1948-2013: a dear and trusted friend finally murdered by Tory ideologues.

Those words were written recently by Owen Jones, a young writer I admire and whose politics might best be described as “real Labour”.

Like many in England, he is horrified at the slow death by privatisation of the health service south of the Border.

Westminster has already abandoned the principle of free education, charging university students £9000 a year for tuition – a road Scotland’s SNP Government refused to follow.

Here, the SNP took Stracathro Hospital, Labour’s flirtation with the private sector, back into the NHS.

The SNP also banned the private cleaning firms in the NHS and saw a massive drop in hospital-acquired infections as a result.

But in England, the dismantling of the NHS, which began when Labour’s Tony Blair introduced Foundation Hospitals, is gathering pace.

Westminster’s Health and Social Care Act is now in force.

In a public letter last month, a thousand doctors and nurses warned the new law would “force virtually every part of the English NHS to be opened up to the private sector”.

They were ignored.

It seems that the public interest comes second to the self-interest of Westminster elites.

Yesterday it was alleged that a company owned by Lynton Crosby, the controversial adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, advised a private healthcare consortium hoping to benefit from the act, which allows private commissioning of health services worth £60billion.

Crosby is also alleged to have influenced the Tory U-turn on introducing plain cigarette packing – the tobacco giant Philip Morris are another of his well-paying clients.

He denies any conflict of interest, as does Cameron.

Scotland has already said it will press ahead with the plans for plain packaging, after research from Australia showed it to be effective in reducing tobacco use. We are extremely fortunate that health matters are already decided independently by the Scottish Parliament.

We can only look south with sympathy.

Bus company Arriva already run ambulance services in Greater Manchester and will soon do the same in Gloucestershire. Virgin Care claim to provide 100 NHS services across England and have a network of 24 GP provider companies.

Virgin have been chosen to run community health and care services for NHS Surrey.

This will include children’s social care services, prison healthcare and sexual health services.

Westminster has just sold off the NHS blood plasma products division to an American private equity company whose interests include Burger King. That says it all really.

Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust in Essex has even introduced a private option for chemotherapy.

But let’s not fool ourselves that these unwelcome changes will be reversed by a change of UK Government.

Writing in the BMJ earlier this year, Dr Lucy Reynolds – a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – said that Labour’s previous reforms prepared the ground for the Tory's full blown privatisation.

Dr Reynolds points out that patients won’t notice until too late because private forms will be allowed to use the NHS logo. It doesn’t affect us in Scotland.

But because Scotland’s health budget is based on what is spent in England, we should pay attention.

Scotland’s money for university education was slashed when the UK Government stopped funding English universities, forcing them to put up fees.

The Scottish Government had to fill the hole they left from other pots of money.

If the same thing happened in health, we would find money slashed in the same way. And how would we fill the gap then?

It is increasingly clear that to keep NHS Scotland healthy, we must fund it from Scotland too.

And we can only do that if our parliament has the full powers of independence.