Earlier this month, Michael Gove denied Jeremy Corbyn’s claims that the public don’t trust the Tories with Britain’s public health service. “The NHS has been kept safe and well funded for most of its life by Conservative Governments,” he said, while Corbyn had been undermining the “wealth creators” who funded public services. “So please stow it.”

But what if we don’t “stow it”? In recent years, Conservative governments have overseen a massive increase in NHS privatization, with billions of pounds of contracts handed out to private providers. Meanwhile, waiting times in NHS hospitals are now at their worst level since records began – earlier this year, numbers showed tens of thousands of patients waited more than four hours for a bed. That’s quite a distance from the party’s pledge that the NHS would be “safe in our hands.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise – Tory resentment for the NHS has been there from the beginning. When Labour minister (and Tribune editor) Aneurin Bevan founded the NHS in the 1940s, Winston Churchill condemned him as a “squalid nuisance.” Churchill’s Conservative Party voted against the NHS’s creation twenty-two times, including at Second and Third Reading, alleging that the legislation “undermines the freedom and independence of the medical profession to the detriment of the nation.”