DAVID CAMERON puts on a bravura show of indignation whenever the opposition points out how disastrous his government has been for our health service.

“How dare they frighten people who rely on our NHS!” he blustered at his party’s annual conference in October in a rare return to the “compassionate conservatism” propaganda of yesteryear.

The PM’s problem is that Labour doesn’t need to tell people the Tories are wrecking the health service. 

Anyone who relies on our NHS — and that’s virtually everyone apart from the pampered parasites who bankroll the Conservative Party — can see it for themselves.

The impact of cuts, underfunding, A&E closures and the confusion caused by former health secretary Andrew Lansley’s chaotic privatisation drive meant that an NHS winter crisis was widely predicted, although the fact that his successor Jeremy Hunt has been reduced to asking stricken hospitals to send him four bullet-point ideas on what to do suggests he at least has been caught unawares.

But even health experts have been taken aback by the scale of this year’s A&E breakdown. NHS England statistics show that 407,844 patients waited for more than four hours to be seen in A&E departments from October to December 2014.

That’s a rise from 227,400 in the same period last year — a 44 per cent increase in just 12 months.

NHS stats also revealed that the number waiting up to 12 hours for a bed to become available has almost quadrupled since last year, to 20,962 in the last fortnight in December.

Tory health policy has always been about fragmenting and outsourcing NHS contracts in order to make profits for their private-sector pals, not about improving outcomes for patients. 

Indeed, what with the vast “efficiency savings” demanded out of the supposedly ring-fenced health budget, frozen funding despite rising demand and the billions splurged on Lansley’s reorganisation, the Conservatives themselves have known from the beginning that services would suffer.

How else can we explain the coalition government’s decision, as early as 2010, to reduce the target for patients seen within a four-hour time limit from 98 per cent to 95 per cent? (Even the Con-Dems’ lower target is no longer being met).

Or the refusal to publish the Risk Register commissioned to assess the dangers of Lansley’s privatising Act?

How to justify Hunt’s leaked decision before Christmas to allow ambulances to take longer to answer calls?

All are signs that the Conservatives are more concerned with hiding the consequences of their mismanagement than dealing with them.

Government stooges plead that failing to meet targets is not their fault, since the number of visits to A&E has risen.

But why has it risen? As the Care and Support Alliance (CSA) and charities Sense and Independent Age point out, the axe taken to council budgets by this government has had a catastrophic impact on social care.

CSA’s Richard Hawkes points out that the NHS “is forced to pick up the pieces when people become isolated, can’t live on their own and slip into crisis.”

When it comes to the blame for Britain’s health emergency, all roads lead to the Conservative Party and its callous cuts and privatisation agenda.

Here’s our four bullet points, Hunt.

• Repeal the Health and Social Care Act and kick the privateers out of our health service.
• Prevent hospital cuts and closures as a result of PFI contracts, which have loaded hard-pressed hospitals with debt, and force a renegotiation of contracts on the basis of fair value, with a refund of excess payments from extortionate schemes.
• Reverse the cuts to council budgets and give local authorities the money needed to run vital caring services.
• Break from George Osborne’s spending freeze which is starving the NHS of funds, and give our dedicated NHS staff the pay rise they deserve in recognition of the titanic efforts they are making to keep hospitals running in the face of your disastrous policies.