THERE is blood on the carpet. Well, there would be if bureaucrats had blood in their veins rather than ink.

The latest episode in the long-drawn-out terminal illness of the NHS featured a cover-up of infant deaths at Morecambe by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

No wonder we all suffer a sharp intake of breath at this news; for it’s the CQC which was set up to ensure that medical practice is of the highest standards. The cover-up demonstrates not only bad practice but corruption at the very centre of the body set up to monitor quality. The bureaucracy operating and cosseting the NHS is rotten to the core.

It gets much worse. When the report into this cover-up was published last week, the names of the senior bureaucrats involved were “redacted” – a posh word which means that their names were blacked out from the text. So they were referred to as “Mr E, Mr F and Mr G.”

It turns out that these gentlemen are not gentlemen at all. They are ladies. Or women.

A friend of mine – actually a retired doctor – phoned me and asked if I’d seen pictures of these officials. He described them as: “Faces ravaged by decades of addiction to socialism.”

David Prior, the chairman of the CQC has said: “The public can have no confidence that the hospitals watchdog has done a good job.”

That’s putting it mildly, Mr Prior. The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt has apologised on behalf of the Government and the NHS to the families of the mothers and babies who died as a result of incompetence and neglect.

All this hand-wringing, talk of “exceptions”

and “bad apples” and the promise to put things right is just so much hot air, for it has become obvious that the NHS generally is a shambolic institution failing in innumerable departments.

The Morecambe scandal follows swiftly on the shocking report of neglect in Staffordshire, on dismal accounts of widespread failures in care homes and home care, of chaos at A&E departments and failures in the care supposed to be provided by GPs.

We were warned long since of the debacle in the NHS. Thirty years ago, Dr Max Gammon published his Gammon’s Law, also called the Theory of Bureaucratic Displacement, which states: “In a bureaucratic system, increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. Such systems act like black holes in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of what they actually produce.”

The more you pay, the worse it gets.

The continuous colossal increase in the money poured into the NHS means the amount of cash it now swallows is almost unimaginable. It is our sacred cow. Laughably its enthusiasts still call it “the envy of the world” whereas even a glance at how they do things in many other countries puts us to shame.

Dr Gammon was right but political ideology meant that his warning was dismissed as vexatious scaremongering.

The NHS is not the only failing institution, merely the largest. There is a rider to Gammon’s Law which recognises that when any bureaucracy gets too big it ceases to exist for the people it was meant to serve and exists instead for the benefit of the functionaries who operate it. Criticise this and you are told to shut up. You might frighten people.

Good. It’s only when enough of us get sufficiently frightened that there’s even the ghost of a chance anything will be done.