“This Bill will destroy the NHS,” said Ms Pollock, London University professor of Health Policy and Health Services Research. “If you care for the future, you need to focus now on stopping the Bill. This is a terrifying, Big-Bang moment, because Lansley and his team are moving us to a mixed-financing system similar to that in the US.”

“It will be the end of free care for all,” said Mr Leys, emeritus professor of political science at Goldsmiths’ College. The future he foresaw would be one in which “community care will contract and decline, everyone who can afford to will go private and all we’ll be left with is a much-reduced service for the poor”.

He was cheered when he said he was surprised to see the White Paper on health reform “sprung on us shortly after the Coalition came to power because there was nothing about it in the manifesto of either party.” Little by little, he warned, “the policy table at the Health Department [has come] to be filled by people with a private-sector agenda.” Yet all the evidence is that the NHS leads the world in terms of outcomes, he said.