If any doubts lingered about the danger posed to our NHS by the ruling conservative coalition, Circle Health’s decision to walk away from its Hinchingbrooke healthcare trust contract should settle them.

Medical professionals, health unions, local campaigners and the Morning Star opposed this privatisation from day one and we were right.

It would be comforting to say that Labour had taken a similar stance, but the new Labour government was no less entranced by calls for private-sector penetration and an internal market in our health service than the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham’s acceptance that Labour in government was wrong to snuggle up to private health providers is a rare recognition by the opposition front bench that a new approach is needed.

Circle’s priority has always been to its shareholders, which is at variance with basic NHS principles.

The Tories have no defence against the charge that they and their Liberal Democrat accomplices bear full responsibility for this private-sector shambles other than tired and overused claims of “playing politics” or treating the NHS as a “political football.”

The government’s unheralded top-down NHS reorganisation, its Health & Social Care Act and its clear preference for private-sector hollowing out of the NHS in England lie behind the ongoing crisis at all levels.

What was this agenda if not playing politics with our NHS to undermine its social nature?

HIH

Ministers and privateers were equally mesmerised by the misplaced faith that private-sector management would identify inefficiencies and financial flabbiness in the public sector.

As the campaigning group Hands Off Hinchingbrooke forecast before the trust’s privatisation, Circle’s claim that the company could drive through £311 million of efficiency savings over 10 years was unsustainable.

So, having reached its predetermined maximum loss liability of just £5m, Circle has emulated the private train operating companies that have run away when the going gets difficult.

Circle points to current pressures on A&E departments as a factor in its inability to turn a profit at Hinchingbrooke.

There’s the rub. Privatisation only works in good times when shareholders can rest content that contracts are abundant and well padded and they can lie back and wait for the dividends to roll in.

The difficult and the unexpected put private profits in jeopardy and that’s when the privateers cut and run.

HIH

This isn’t surprising to people who work in the NHS or depend on it for their care, but it doesn’t register with the privatisation zealots of all major parliamentary parties who have conspired to import the profit nexus into our health service.

It’s not just the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Prominent new Labourites Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Patricia Hewitt and Alan Milburn made private-sector involvement in the NHS an article of faith.

And some of them drew their ill-gotten rewards by being welcomed aboard the private health providers.

Even now there are weaknesses in Labour’s position such as designating public bodies as the preferred rather than sole bidder for NHS contracts.

However, any comparison between Labour’s stance and that of the conservative coalition parties is essentially one of chalk and cheese.

English voters will be faced in May with a clear choice over stewardship of the NHS, the postwar Labour government’s jewel in its crown.

Billions of pounds of public finance are being leeched from the NHS by privateers.

Undecided voters should stop, think and remember Circle’s abject failure at Hinchingbrooke.