So much for taking the politics out of the NHS

So here we are again. At least Lord Justice Leveson had the humanity to give us a couple of weeks off whining celebrities, shifty ex-journalists and declaiming newspaper editors. From the Health and Social Care Bill there is no respite. The Bill is back in the House of Lords and Liberal Democrat guerrillas are wound up for a fresh assault on the lumbering mule train as it passes through.

Does anyone care any more which bit of this battered and bleeding legislation has been chosen for further victimisation in this week’s shenanigans? In case you do, it is part three of the Bill, the casket that carries the remains of what was once Andrew Lansley’s sunlit vision of an NHS of competing providers, kept on their toes by a powerful and provocative regulator of the type associated with the transformation of telecoms and utility services in the 1980s. Monitor, the aforementioned regulator, has already had most of its teeth pulled during earlier phases of the Lib Dem trashing of the Bill.