While the Labour Party conference is immersed in the great soap opera of who will succeed Tony Blair, the real battle for Labour is being fought out in a series of fringe meetings on the future of NHS, writes David Hencke.
Frankly it is not going to matter a damn whether Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson, or John Reid becomes prime minister if the public believes that the Labour party has abandoned its commitment to a publicly funded and publicly run NHS.
The one brand image that survived the entire Thatcher era was this: that the greatest gift socialism ever gave to the British public was the setting up of the NHS.
No matter how the Tories tried to put it, no one ever believed that the NHS was "safe in their hands".
Now Labour is threatening to put this achievement at risk by imposing an absurd financial timetable on health authorities to get back into the black, and rushing towards handing over swaths of services to be run by the private sector.
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