Labour can turn NHS scandal into a platform for revolution The belief that giving hospitals autonomy would automatically improve them failed spectacularly in the case of Mid Staffordshire. Yet that orthodoxy, implanted under Labour, has been developed by the Tories to the point where Mr Hunt is more a commentator on the ills of the NHS than the architect of its cure. Last month Mr Burnham laid out his own plans for NHS reform in one of the most important speeches of the Miliband era. In it, he rehearsed the economic and human madness of a system where up to 40 per cent of hospital beds are reportedly filled by dementia patients with nowhere else to go. Mr Burnham was no doubt keen to get his message out before today's report illustrated his core argument. The Staffordshire scandal, in which patients were left lying in filthy beds and reduced to drinking water from flower vases, was only partly a chronicle of medical error. It was, at heart, the story of a care crisis endemic in a system equipped to deal with the quick cures and early deaths of the past century - but not with an ageing population. Whatever the human failings involved, our nurses have not simply grown nastier. An NHS unfit for purpose has become institutionally brutal. The Mid Staffordshire debacle illustrates the absurdity of a service where £104 billion is spent on the NHS and only £15 billion on social care. That budget should, as Mr Burnham argued, be turned on its head. But even savings from keeping the elderly out of hospital, estimated at tens of billions of pounds, would not meet the costs of good social care. And so, in his most incendiary proposal, Mr Burnham argued for an "all-in approach" to underpin his version of the integrated health system long and valiantly promoted by Stephen Dorrell, the Tory chairman of the health select committee. The innocuous Burnhamism "all-in" is shorthand either for compulsory social insurance or, more probably, the 10 per cent levy on all estates, great and small, which prompted Tory hysteria over the "death tax." Some shadow ministers might rather swim with great white sharks emerging from a January detox diet than explain to Ed Balls the wisdom of such a measure. But both Mr Balls and Mr Miliband, despite rightly challenging Mr Burnham to defend every detail, are said to be sympathetic. The growing feeling, in sensible sections of the Labour Party, is that the voters" mood has changed. Fear of old age is highlighted not only by the cruelties laid bare today by Mr Francis. Families across Britain see their elderly relatives shunted towards living deaths, or worry about the decline of a health service that must, sooner or later, implode under the weight of increasing demand and diminishing resources. Against that background, the Burnham Bombshell is gaining momentum. Although he was careful to stress that his speech was a "green paper" consultation exercise, insiders say the hope is that Labour will be able to announce the greatest NHS revolution since Beveridge at this year's party conference, with full details to follow in 2014. Even if the Coalition cobbles together a version of the less radical reforms proposed by the economist Andrew Dilnot, a likely lifetime cap on care costs of £75,000 means that all but the very affluent will have their savings decimated. As Mr Burnham must be aware, he will have to clarify how he could undertake such major reform without incurring the two years of paralysis caused by the Tories" structural upheavals. Labour would also have to sell a system paid for by all, but invoked only by those needing care. Yet even voters once spooked by a "death tax" might now agree that the alternatives are uglier by far. If Plan Burnham works (and the Edometer long applied by Mr Miliband and Mr Balls is calibrated to pick up any design flaws), Britain would not only have a better NHS doing more with less money. There would also be an end to the iniquitous deal under which people who have worked hard all their lives risk losing everything - money, home, dignity and hope - because we live in a country where dementia and old age itself are taxed. The Francis report, whatever it reveals, will not simply chronicle isolated examples of carnage on our wards. It will also be an indictment of a health system so corrupted that compassion is becoming a rationed commodity. It is easy for Labour to be on the side of organic social changes, such as gay marriage. Yesterday's victory, welcome as it is, will be all but forgotten by 2015, when health, along with the economy and immigration, will be decisive. Mr Miliband has, in the Burnham plan, the big idea that could win him not only the election but his place in history. For his sake, and for Britain's, he should seize it.