I'm not quoting the following either to attack it or endorse it. It does, though, seem to encapsulate much of the disillusion presently dragging "New" Labour down:
"When I had my first child, in 2000, I went to Queen Charlotte's Hospital in Chiswick. It was the hospital where I was born and nothing seemed to have changed. Paint was peeling off the walls, the blinds were broken, the food mainly consisted of Jaffa cakes bought at the local garage, but the service was fantastic. The hospital provided one-to-one midwifery and home visits, the consultant could concentrate on patients rather than paperwork, and the staff appeared badly paid but proud of their achievements.By the time I had my second child, the hospital had moved to a gleaming new building next to Wormwood Scrubs prison. You could buy toffee yoghurts from the shop but the system seemed less efficient. The midwives were overstretched and under-equipped, no accommodation had been provided for them, so they often commuted an hour to work in the middle of the night and seemed exhausted. They were expected to follow endless directives and could no longer rely on intuition and experience or get to know their mothers. One week they were told to encourage hospital births, the next week women were supposed to be getting out the paddling pool in the bedroom. By the time I had my fourth child, last year, there were no available beds so we went straight home after the birth - but at least we didn't have to pay for the now exorbitant cost of the car park.
My post-natal experience was worse. After the birth of my first baby, the doorbell rang and Terry, the health visitor, arrived. She had been looking after new mothers for 20 years and dispensed good advice. By my second child, she had quit. When I bumped into her in the supermarket she explained that she couldn't cope with the workload. She may have been offered a larger salary but she was expected to see twice as many cases. She no longer had the chance to have a cup of tea with her new mothers and check they weren't depressed - all she did was fill out forms.
By my fourth child, the midwife who eventually came to our house, a week after the birth, had to fill out 30 pages of forms - she didn't even have time to weigh the baby. When I took my son to the surgery, a frazzled temporary health visitor misread the growth chart and sent him as dangerously underweight to hospital, where he nearly broke the scales. The surgery now struggles to cope - it has a new computer but has no idea of the number of jabs my children have received."
Would things have been better under the Tories? I doubt it. Would they better under Cameron? I doubt that too. But am I still in the majority? The whole piece by Alice Thomson is here.