WHEN local health workers and Labour Party activists held a Save our NHS stall in central Brighton recently, people were queuing up to sign the petition to halt the Government’s reforms.

More than 2,000 signatures were collected in the space of a few hours.

People paused to tell stories about their positive NHS experiences, and to express concern over the proposed changes to the service.

But let’s go back a bit.

When Labour Health Minister Nye Bevan created the Health Service back in 1948, it was designed to free people from the fear of falling ill.

Its services were to be free at the point of delivery and designed so that no one in our country – rich or poor – would ever want for proper health care.

The Government, via the Health and Social Care Bill, is now seeking to fundamentally change the founding principles of the NHS, and the way it is run.

In what I firmly believe could be one of its biggest tests to date for the Lords, we will today begin to look at the Bill.

Many thought the battle to safeguard our treasured health service had been won when, following the general election, David Cameron pledged that funding for the NHS would remain at Labour’s record levels and promised no top down reorganisation.

But we were wrong. The Bill now before the Lords is a massive 300 clauses long. It seeks to introduce competition and a financial regulator into the NHS and to establish that services can be commissioned to any willing provider.

It shifts already overworked doctors into a key commissioning role and places them in the invidious position of being poacher and gamekeeper in the way our health service is run and organised.

Some argue there has already been a degree of private involvement in the NHS. This may be true, but only to a very limited extent (mostly to provide back office and auxiliary services, and often with mixed results).

Now Mr Cameron and Andrew Lansley want to bring the private sector into the service to drive down (mostly staff) costs.

This is a Government that said it would keep the NHS well funded, but is now demanding savings of more than £20billion.

It is that which is driving the privatisation measures.

And strangely, it’s being done at a time when the Government estimates it will need £2 billion just to carry out the very top down reorganisation it promised it wouldn’t introduce.

Last week, Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust announced it was to lose a further 128 posts.

It is providers like these, right around the country, that are bearing the brunt of Mr Cameron’s medicine.

These are services that, prior to the election, were succeeding as never before, with more doctors, more nurses, better quality care, new hospital buildings, better trained staff and lower waiting times and faster treatment.

As the latest waiting time figures show, all that is being put at risk.

If the current Health Bill goes through, we can expect to see further job losses, and services stretched to breaking point.

And we can expect the end of Nye Bevan’s dream of universal health care free at the point of delivery.

I shall be proudly voting to stop the Health Bill this week in the Lords and doing my best to organise against it as Opposition Chief Whip.

The Commons has failed the nation on this largely because Liberal Democrats have conveniently forgotten their election pledges and have been driven by the Government whips to toe the line.

I shall be asking my colleagues to form a new sort of Coalition in the Lords; a Coalition to Save the NHS.

I don’t much care who joins us.

Independent peers, Lib Dems, Bishops or Tories – they are all welcome.

But Labour is under no illusion as to what is needed.

This is a bad Bill, it does bad things to the NHS we all care about. We will do all we can to stop it.