Back in April I said in this column that the NHS could never be properly reformed – arguing that, if it were possible to reform it, the reforms would have happened before now. This is a national tragedy because the NHS is a national disgrace, an inefficient legion of generally useless bureaucrats wasting billions. I also argued that, when an institution becomes massively unwieldy in this way, it ceases to exist for those it was set up to serve and exists instead for the benefit of its powerfully unionised employees.

Predictably, for a politician who is more PR man than prophet, David Cameron has abandoned the main thrust of his proposed NHS reforms, terror-struck at the health unions’ threats of paralysing strikes if there were any plans to introduce competition and the profit motive into the service. It was feeble of Cameron to give in to union threats and the public’s uninformed and sentimental attachment to state provision. But Britain is the only European country to persist in this socialist fetish. Germany and France, for example, operate health services which are paid for by both public and private money – and they are much better than ours. Still we hear the maundering chorus:“Our NHS is the envy of the world.” Not any more. In many of its departments – especially in its administration – it is a shambles.

What goes for the NHS applies to state education too. Michael Gove doesn’t stand a chance of reforming the schools, because sensible proposals will always be defeated by the left-wing backwoodsmen in the savagely militant teachers’ unions. It’s that word “private”

again. Why does it have to be a dirty word? It’s well beyond the time when we ought to have abandoned the fantasy that we are some sort of socialist utopia. Efficient institutions the world over achieve their success because they have ditched suffocating ideology and adopted schemes which involve partnership between government and business.

It is this sort of practical, pragmatic policy- making which makes for all kinds of exciting and creative improvements.

These dinosaur ideological obsessions and the massive strikes they will produce in the autumn will make the country ungovernable.

Certainly, I don’t see Cameron’s nerve holding against the forces of destruction.

He is even weaker than Edward Heath, who caved in in the face of industrial strife in the early Seventies, and Jim Callaghan, who was defeated by union militancy in the winter of discontent in 1979.

The truth is that the hordes of unionised militants simply cannot get it into their heads the country is broke.

They never ask themselves just who is going to pay for their inflated bureaucracies, their jobs for life and pensions the rest of us can only dream about.

The deficit for the financial year to date is £27.4bn, a record for the period.

If we go on like this – and there is not the slightest sign that anyone in government or opposition will resolve our debt crisis – we are heading for Third World status with abysmal public services, a constantly decaying infrastructure and networks of sleaze and corruption to rival any tinpot African dictatorship.