Tony Blair and John Reid yesterday unleashed Labour's long-expected onslaught on Conservative health plans when they challenged Michael Howard to come out from behind his "human shield" and explain how using taxpayers' money to help the better-off get private operations will help the NHS - or its patients.
Evidently stung by this week's Tory charges that Labour policies cost lives - in cancelled operations, drugs availability and even clean wards - the health secretary said voters had not forgotten years of Conservative under-investment in the NHS.
"Those were years not of cancelled operations but of cancelled lives," he said in a reference to Margaret Dixon's much-postponed operation, highlighted by the Tories last week.
"Mr Howard, stop using human shields to hide behind. Have the guts to come out into the open and debate your indefensible policy. You won't, of course. You daren't because you know that it's a policy of cuts and charges that is unfair, immoral and contrary to the very principle on which the NHS was founded," Mr Reid told reporters.
Both cabinet members coupled the attack with a determination to use spare capacity in private sector hospitals to do NHS work, cutting waiting lists by means which Mr Reid admitted had been blocked to Labour governments in the past by "dogma".
In a swipe as much aimed at his own left wing as the Conservatives, he said: "We are not going to let dogma stop us us ing it [the private sector] if we are purchasing [care] free at the point of use to NHS patients." But he did not expect the private sector's share of such work to rise above 15% during his ministerial tenure.
While the prime minister played the "soft cop" at Labour's mini-manifesto launch in London, explaining the government's plans to cut waiting lists to an 18 week maximum, his health secretary took a hard line in denouncing the Tory proposals.
Both sides are hurling statistics at each other over the NHS's performance since Labour started pumping extra billions into the service, and yesterday the Tories sent two people dressed as rodents to picket Labour's launch, waving Groundhog Day posters to suggest voters had heard Mr Reid's excuses before.
But the health secretary stood his ground and accused his rivals of manipulating average waiting time figures to include all those who suffered delays as a result of Tory under-funding - an average 18 months in 1997, often well below 18 weeks now and falling fast, he said.
Mr Blair conceded that in 1997 "there was a sense within the NHS that the system was in irreversible decline. In 2005, no, it is not perfect, yes, there is a lot to do. But yes also, it is definitively better than it was, improving significantly and that's why it's so important we carry on moving the service forward and don't switch the clock back."
At their own Westminster election press conference yesterday - 50 yards along the street - Mr Howard and his health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, unveiled proposals designed to improve Britain's poor performance on sexual health, particularly among young people who, they said, face peer pressure which leads to disease.
Mr Reid spoke of Mr Howard's "reticence" about the passport scheme, allowing NHS patients to "buy" private treatment, and it was not mentioned at the Tory event. Ministers were instead accused of downplaying sexual health - and binge drinking.
They contrasted that with Norman Fowler's TV campaign on Aids prevention during the Tory government of the 1980s.
Polly Toynbee, page 22
