DAVID CAMERON has clearly decided to tackle the electorate’s greater confidence in Labour over health matters by waging a vilification campaign against the NHS in Wales.

Labour has always maintained that the NHS is not safe in Tory hands and has put public health at the centre of its general election campaign.

The Tories are hitting back by linking up with the Daily Mail to root out stories of Welsh NHS shortcomings, real and imagined, to confect a picture of Offa’s Dyke representing a line between life and death.

There are certainly failings in the NHS in Wales, but they are neither endemic nor specific to the Welsh model.

Patients, health professionals, trade unions, Welsh government and voters are united in opposition to the internal market and top-down reorganisation imposed on the health service in England by the conservative coalition.

Nor should it be forgotten that the health budget in Wales is subject to the Barnett formula block grant from Whitehall to Cardiff Bay that short-changes Wales by £300 million a year and which the Westminster coalition has cut by 10 per cent.

If funds were based on need rather than population, as Lord Barnett himself proposes, the Welsh government would be better placed to increase NHS spending.

It seems bizarre just weeks after Cameron and other Westminster party leaders welcomed the No vote in the Scottish independence referendum that he could stoop to contrasting the number of Welsh patients treated in hospitals in England and vice-versa.

His clear insinuation is that, if four times as many Welsh residents are treated in England as English residents in Wales, this must represent a definitive choice based on qualitative criteria.

He must know that the countries cannot be compared in population, wealth, number of hospitals or specialist units.

Cameron obviously sees himself as prime minister of England alone and has no compunction in portraying Welsh patients in English NHS units as some kind of freeloading health tourists.

The PM was able to appreciate at first hand the contempt that most Scottish voters feel for him and his party during his fleeting visits during the independence referendum campaign.

That’s why, recognising his own toxicity, he deferred happily to former Labour leader Gordon Brown to take centre stage in the campaign’s final stages.

No sooner were the votes counted than Cameron sought partisan advantage by misinterpreting his eve-of-poll promise of “extensive new powers” for Scotland as restrictions on Scottish MPs’ powers at Westminster.

While wanting Scotland to remain as part of the UK, he and his party have self-evidently washed their hands of parliamentary representation from that direction.

The Tory leader’s similarly expressed contempt for Welsh people seeking healthcare, for which they have paid, in England indicates that they don’t expect rich electoral pickings from Wales either.

That would be unsurprising since Tory MPs in Wales are a cross between an endangered species and a variety of wildlife sustained in isolated areas by peculiar local environmental factors.

However, Cameron must not pass off his government’s escalating privatisation of the NHS in England as a success story.

It is deteriorating swiftly, with hospitals weighed down by debts and care services at near breaking point.

Tory and Liberal Democrat opposition to the NHS public service ethos, based on the paramountcy of private profits, is lethal to health services throughout Britain and must be rejected next May.