PARLIAMENT’S opportunity today to back Clive Efford MP’s National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill is a chance to undo some of the appalling damage done to our NHS over the last four years.

MPs will debate the Bill for the second time a day after public-service union Unison exposed how a £1 billion contract to run primary care support services has been drawn up specifically to exclude NHS bidders — guaranteeing that millions of patient records will be handed to the private sector.

The bid-list for the 10-year contract presents a familiar litany of profit-hungry privateers.

It includes the US weapons giant Lockheed Martin, whose shares are currently booming because spiralling conflict in the Middle East is good news for a company that makes Hellfire missiles.

Presumably it hopes gaining experience in squeezing profits out of the injured will boost its ability to make even more out of war.

“Professional services” firm KPMG, whose head of health Mark Britnell helped advise David Cameron on Andrew Lansley’s privatising Health and Social Care Act, is interested too.

Britnell helped pitch the NHS-wrecking Bill to the private healthcare industry back in 2010, when he reportedly told a conference: “The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Despite his later plea that the quote “did not properly reflect” the debate, he’s clearly been taking his own advice.

Ubiquitous bunglers G4S and Serco are up for it too. Charging the public for tagging non-existent offenders, making such a balls-up of the Olympics that the army had to intervene and the fact that people have a nasty habit of dying in your care are evidently not obstacles to running NHS contracts.

The flocks of vultures circling round every new NHS contract give the lie to Cameron’s hysterical red-faced denials that his government is privatising the health service.

Labour has, rightly, pledged that it will repeal Lansley’s Act if it wins in May. But with the party so far failing to mount a convincing attack on austerity and privatisation dogma that would rally its millions of natural supporters, we cannot rely on any such victory.

Efford’s Bill would not consign the Health and Social Care Act to the oblivion it so richly deserves.

But it would remove some of the most dangerous threats to the NHS included in that law.

It would repeal Section 75, which orders the NHS to put all new contracts out to tender.

It would exempt the health service from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which the government refuses to do.

TTIP poses a much broader menace to Britain’s working people than this, and the campaign to stop the treaty in its entirety — a position unanimously endorsed at the TUC in September — would still need to go ahead if Efford’s Bill passes. 

But an exemption would be a start and could help draw attention to the threats to workers’ pay and conditions, the environment and all public services that TTIP represents.

The Bill would also take away hospitals’ ability to derive up to 49 per cent of their income from private healthcare and restore the Health Secretary’s responsibility for the NHS.

In the week that research by Unite revealed the links many MPs who voted on Lansley’s Act had to the private healthcare industry, Parliament should take this opportunity to show that it is not the corrupt and self-serving institution it so often appears to be.

It should pass Efford’s Bill and do everything it takes to turn it into law.