DAVID CAMERON is scraping the barrel when his strongest riposte in response to Ed Miliband’s justified accusation that the Prime Minister bears responsibility for the crisis in England’s NHS is that the Labour leader is playing politics.

Does he not expect Labour to make rescuing the NHS from the grip of galloping privatisation its major campaigning issue?

And if Miliband’s description of the situation facing accident and emergency services in England as a crisis amounts to using the issue as a “political football,” how would Cameron characterise his own offensive comments about health services in Wales?

He told last year’s Welsh Tory conference that Offa’s Dyke was a “line between life and death,” claiming that patients on waiting lists were dying in Wales because of NHS cuts imposed by the Cardiff Bay government.

Apart from the sad fact that some people on waiting lists die before treatment, irrespective of where they live, Cameron “forgets” that Welsh spending depends on grants from central government.

Wales has been short-changed by the Barnett formula and by a Westminster refusal to base funding on need rather than a simple head count.

Rather than persist with his offensive comments to undermine Britain’s only Labour government, Cameron might be better advised to concentrate on the problems of NHS England for which he bears direct responsibility.

No fewer than 14 hospitals in England have already declared major incidents as patients hoping to access A&E services are kept waiting for hours for an ambulance to arrive or outside a hospital in an ambulance or inside a hospital on a trolley.

Fire brigades and police vehicles have been pressed into providing makeshift ambulance services.

Not only is this a crisis but one directly attributable to changes imposed by Cameron’s coalition.

He affected to oppose new top-down NHS reorganisation before the 2010 general election. He lied.

He insisted that our NHS was safe in Tory and Liberal Democrat hands. Again he lied.

Even Tory-supporting media agree that health services in England face meltdown in the worst NHS emergency in at least a decade.

The overload on A&E services was not only foreseeable but widely foreseen. 

It has been a logical consequence of the government’s penny-pinching on social care provision.

Many vulnerable and frail older patients taken to hospital are fated to stay there because there is no provision to look after them in their own homes once treatment is complete.

Hospitals are obliged to hold on to them, putting additional pressure on beds and nursing staff.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt can warble on about £700 million additional funding and greater numbers of doctors, nurses and beds being available, but he cannot dispute the reality that the system is not working.

Hunt cannot even blame exceptional weather conditions since this winter has been remarkably mild so far.

NHS England’s problems derive from government insistence on cutting finance for social care and assisting its private-sector friends to lap up profitable healthcare contracts.

Andy Burnham’s acceptance that the last Labour government was too closely tied up with the privateers is a useful recognition of the need for public ownership and delivery in future.

At the risk of being accused by Cameron of using the NHS as a political football, the Morning Star shares Miliband’s view that the way to get rid of the crisis in the NHS is to get rid of this Prime Minister.