WITH less than three months to the election, I’ve been trying to penetrate the parties’ propaganda to locate something solid.

Take the nation’s health, for example, which will be one of the big issues come May. I’ve listened this week to two eminent doctors.

Dr James LeFanu has written some important books and hundreds of articles about the NHS. He recalls how he started his career at Whipps Cross hospital in London 40 years ago: one of the biggest hospitals in Europe “which ran itself with just half a dozen senior administrators. There are now 70.”

James spoke of “a plethora of bureaucracies of byzantine complexity. Not surprisingly, no one really has a clue what is going on in the NHS and costs continue to spiral upwards.” In 1975, there were 500 senior administrators in the NHS, but today there are tens of thousands.

Next I spoke to Dr Max Gammon, a distinguished cardiac surgeon now retired and a historian of the health service. Max told me about the pre-war days and the municipal hospitals, based on old workhouses and infirmaries which were often filthy, dilapidated and brutal. These places were run by local authorities. Max showed me a paragraph from the 1926 Encyclopaedia Britannica:

“Unfortunately a close study of this question tends to prove that municipal hospitals for the most part have resulted in a dead monotony of relative inefficiency. The absence of competition, and the freedom from continuous publicity and criticism such as the voluntary hospitals enjoy, make for inefficiency and indifferent work.”

Max added: “Those who can remember pre-NHS hospitals will confirm that, in general, patients and staff preferred the atmosphere of the voluntary hospitals to that of the public sector institutions.”

These hospitals, built up over hundreds of years, were described by foreign observers as “the envy of the world.” They were founded and supported by charitable endowments and subscriptions. Then he showed me some very striking statistics…

Hospital beds in England and Wales increased from nine beds per thousand of population in 1928 to ten beds per thousand in 1948. This increase was almost entirely within the voluntary sector. Between 1928 and 1938 – the years of the Great Depression - the number of beds in the voluntary sector increased by 33 per cent. In July 1948 Britain's municipal and voluntary hospitals were nationalised to form the NHS - essentially the voluntary system was abolished and the municipal system was centralised and made universal.

No new hospitals at all were built during the first 13 years of the NHS – even though these were the years of the post-war boom - and the number of hospital beds has actually decreased every year since the NHS was founded. While there were ten beds per thousand of the population in 1948, in 2014 there were only 2.6 per thousand.

This is the lowest provision of hospital beds among OECD countries, excepting Chile, Mexico and Turkey. Max said: “Never mind beds per thousand: the nation has lost at least 200,000 beds in absolute terms since the NHS was formed.”

Although this decline has continued relentlessly under both Tory and Labour administrations, neither party will admit the extent of the chaos which now exists in the NHS, let alone try to do something about it that is workable. The problem essentially is that the bureaucracy is out of control. When the number of bureaucrats increases to such fantastic numbers, the NHS no longer exists for the benefit of the public it was set up to serve but in the interests of those who run the system.