The MEP Daniel Hannan’s recent comments on America’s Fox News castigating the NHS as a 60 year mistake reveal the unreformed, doctrinaire side of Cameron’s Conservatives. The basic tenet of his argument – that British healthcare is expensive and ineffective – flies in the face of reality. Britain spends around $2500 per person per year (roughly average for the EU) on the NHS, whilst the US figure is around $5,500. For that extra $3000 per year, Americans can expect to die three years earlier than Britons on average.

Go back 12 years, and at least part of Mr Hannan’s argument would have been accurate. After decades of gross underinvestment, largely at the hands of his own party, NHS performance was poor, its morale crippled and its viability in question. It is clear to any unbiased observer that Labour’s historic decision to triple investment in the NHS over the last three parliaments has resulted in its complete transformation. Waiting times for surgery are down from years to weeks, and death rates from cancer and heart disease are falling steadily.

Not only is his political position misguided and ill-informed, his evident overexcitement at appearing on TV leads him to some quite ridiculous fictions. For example, Hannan states with authority that ‘ a lot of our best and brightest doctors emigrate …[because] we disincentivise people from practicing medicine [in the UK]’. Yet entrance to study medicine at university remains intensely competitive, and emigration of medics is no more than a trickle.

But it is the justification he provides for this and other statements that reveals the underlying motivation for his politics. Speaking of UK doctors he states that ‘there is no market, there’s nothing to help them’. In other words, as his other famous intervention (lambasting the economic stimulus package) evinced, his lodestar is unabated economic liberalism. Like all ideologues he starts with a political conclusion, then invents facts in order to convince his audience and himself of his case. If there were ever a time for economic liberals to show humility, to let realities on the ground guide their politics rather than the reverse, that time must be now.

The true story of the NHS is that over its 60 year history it has provided the security of decent healthcare to generations of Britons. If Mr Hannan believes that to be a mistake, let him make that argument to the 80 per cent of NHS users who rate the service as good or better. Perhaps he could also have an exchange of views with the 42 million Americans who have no access to healthcare. The facts speak for themselves.