I joined campaigners and local residents in Brighton on Friday for a celebration of the National Health Service on its 65^th birthday.

It was a chance to pay tribute to what remains - despite efforts to undermine it - the greatest health service in the world.

It was also an opportunity to pay tribute to the many campaigners across the country who have helped to see off some of the Government’s worst plans to privatise the service.

When the NHS was first founded, Aneurin Bevan said that “it will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

The huge campaign against privatisation has shown that there are plenty of people who still have that faith - and who will fight to protect it from being sold off to the highest bidder.

Back in 1948, the NHS was established as a comprehensive public service, funded by taxation, available to all and free at the time of need. 

Over the years, it has developed into an institution rightly esteemed around the world, and cherished by the British people.

But we shouldn't forget that the NHS was born in the face of fierce opposition - at a time of food rationing, housing shortage and profound poverty.

So when today's Government tries to tell us that, at a time of austerity, we can’t afford public services - that we can’t afford to look after each other - I think we need to call that out as the lie that it is.

When the Government tries to pretend that competition will drive up standards, we need to point to all of the evidence to the contrary.

We know that increasing the role of the market in the NHS won’t make it more efficient, nor make the NHS more responsive to patient needs.

The coalitions’s so-called reforms were never about making the NHS better.  They were always about free market principles. 

Privatisation plans are being driven by ideology, by a blinkered belief that public is bad and private is good; that the public realm can be privatised, commodified and sold off.

So, our birthday present to the NHS must be that we will resist those plans with every power we can - and stay true to its founding principles.