DISABLED campaigners labelled “thugs” by their Tory MP turned out in swelled ranks outside her constituency office this weekend to demonstrate against the hated Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

When a group of residents posed with banners outside her office last month, Employment Minister Priti Patel claimed Unite union leader Len McCluskey was behind the action.

She sent him a furious letter saying a local Tory official “felt harassed, frightened and intimated [sic] when a thuggish gang of People’s NHS campaigners came to our office.”

The group were calling for the NHS to be exempted from TTIP, which threatens to give US corporations an open door to take over public services in Britain.

The campaigners, who live in Ms Patel’s Essex constituency of Witham, were shocked at their MP’s outburst and leafleted their high street to attract a larger crowd to a second event on Saturday, where they posed with placards reading: “Constituent! Not a thug! NHS out of TTIP!”

Disabled resident Bob Lambert told the Star he had got attended the initial session “because I’ve needed healthcare myself.”

“Everyone was there because of health problems,” he said. “Everyone there was over 55, a lot of them disabled. We had one lady in a wheelchair who had never walked in her life, we had people with arthritis who couldn’t make a fist.

“By labelling us thugs, she was totally deflecting from the issue of the health service.

“As constituents we expect her to listen to our concerns.”

Ms Patel inflamed the row when she accused the People’s NHS campaign of being “more interested in political stunts and cheap point-scoring than our health services.”

“This campaign has nothing of any substance to say about the NHS and the organisers are more interested in twisting and misrepresenting my comments on this matter rather than engaging constructively about local health services.

“The People’s NHS is not a credible campaign and has been set up and run by the Unite trade union for shallow political purposes.”

But Mr Lambert said many of those present yesterday would not have considered themselves political activists and that Ms Patel was not targeted for her Tory credentials.

“We’d have been there whoever won the election,” he said. “It’s to do with the common market, not political parties.”