If they had suggested waiting lists for operations would fall by 384,000, that 118 new hospitals and 188 new GP clinics would be either open or being built, I'd have told them to pull the other one.

Those are the undisputed statistics of Labour's record on health. I ought to be celebrating, but I am not because the results from this record investment should be markedly better than a mere three per cent increase in output. And this might sound strange, but I largely blame the Conservatives for spoiling the party.

Several people who know Margaret Thatcher better than I tell me that she privately regards the advent of New Labour as probably her greatest achievement.

When she looks at how, 10 years on, New Labour health policy has evolved, I suspect she may feel more than a little satisfaction. The simple fact is that the influence of her administration over the way the NHS has been shaped by the Blair government has been quite profound.

Shortly after Parliament was first televised, I unknowingly gained the distinction of raising the first point of order in a division during a televised debate. It was at 4am during an all-night sitting and the then Labour Opposition were vigorously opposing line by line Mrs Thatcher's introduction of an NHS internal market. A couple of days later, I began to receive letters from numerous Parliament-watchers in the United States who had been fascinated to note that the procedure had entailed me having to wear a ridiculous top hat. But I, and other Labour MPs, put up with such ridicule, and lack of sleep, in the long battle against the Conservatives' introduction of an NHS purchaser-provider split, the fragmentation of primary and hospital care and the introduction of GP fund-holding. We saw these measures as heralding the wholesale introduction of market forces within our healthcare system.

But what we never envisaged was that a Labour government under Tony Blair would go further with the Tory market reforms in health than Margaret Thatcher would have ever dared. Not only do we still have the purchaser-provider split, but independently operating foundation trusts, private rather than public funding of most major capital developments and the active encouragement of the private healthcare sector.

The language of the NHS is now the language of the market. It didn't start out like that when Labour took power in 1997.

Elected on a clear commitment to end the internal market, its first Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, set about doing so with enthusiasm. Patients of non-fundholding GPs had been disadvantaged in terms of access to hospital treatments and the abolition of fundholding was seen as a return to the key principle of care being provided on the basis of need.

We saw public health making a long overdue return to the centre ground of the NHS, with the Government emphasising the need for important steps to prevent ill health. A decade on, the improvements we have seen in areas such as heart disease underlines the relevance of this approach.

I suspect Dobson would have liked to have been much more radical in the approach to public health, but he was clearly constrained by other factors. The first report produced by the Commons Health Committee after I became Chairman roundly put the boot into the Government's exemption of Formula One from its proposed tobacco advertising ban. In what some have seen as foreshadowing the "cash for coronets" controversy, Formula One's Bernie Ecclestone had a substantial donation to Labour returned to him following the row over the report.

Almost 10 years on from this affair, the Government's ban on smoking in public places will shortly take effect. This is arguably the most significant health measure introduced by the Government and, had it happened earlier, could have saved very many lives. Such a measure was resisted by the Tories and delayed too long because of the political influence of the tobacco industry.

When Alan Milburn succeeded Dobson, he recognised the need for a greater role for primary care, initiating the new Primary Care Trusts. But his much vaunted opposition to private health care mysteriously disappeared almost overnight as he increasingly carried the Blairite flame with unbridled enthusiasm. Neo-Thatcherite notions from No. 10, which would have been strongly resisted by Dobson, were warmly embraced.

The Foundation Hospitals policy – actually defeated at Labour's annual conference – seemed to many on the Labour benches remarkably similar to proposals previously put forward under the Tories. It is little wonder that the Conservative Opposition have had such difficulty in gaining any credibility over the past decade when they have been faced with voting against policies which were often theirs in the first place.

How, for example, could they have anticipated New Labour's wholly uncritical embracing of private healthcare? Initially under Milburn, and subsequently under John Reid and Patricia Hewitt, we have seen the notion that use of the private sector would "expand capacity" broadened into the idea that every NHS patient is pressing first and foremost for "choice".

Bearing in mind that private healthcare is almost wholly staffed by doctors also employed in the NHS, the idea that pushing patients into their private practice somehow helps the NHS is utter nonsense. Having talked to thousands of NHS patients over the years about their concerns, I don't recall any ever mentioning the issue of "choice". They all want good quality services at their local hospitals.

Embracing the private sector and the notion of "choice", "freeing up our hospitals through Foundation Trusts and oiling the mechanisms of the purchaser-provider split through practice based commissioning" may represent the third way in health, but it strikes me as remarkably similar to what Labour was opposing in the 1980s. The centralised "command and control" NHS had its faults, but I fear it may take an avian flu pandemic to remind us that the competitive ethos of a health market makes little sense when we are really under threat.

The pre-occupation with Thatcher/Blairite ideology has seen the NHS subjected to major structural change on an almost annual basis for well over 20
years.

For much of Labour's decade in power, the constant, often ill-thought out, reorganisation of health has been destabilising and hugely expensive, wasting resources which should have been invested in the preventive strategies which can deliver real health gains, as the Government has shown.

Gordon Brown deserves enormous credit for hugely increasing the resources available for health. If he becomes Prime Minister, I hope he will recognise that getting output to match investment will also require a gradual burial of the health market experiment and restoring a collectivist, public sector ethos to our precious NHS.

Tomorrow: Law and order.



David Hinchliffe is the former Labour MP for Wakefield. Until the last election, he was chairman of the Commons health select committee.