EAST Hampshire prospective parliamentary candidate Damian Hinds has dismissed claims the Conservatives plan to “privatise” the NHS.

Launching his election campaign on Monday, Mr Hinds said he often hears people accusing the Tories of wanting to “sell off” the NHS to Donald Trump.

But he told residents this kind of privatisation rhetoric was an age-old tactic of the Labour Party because if you “say it often enough” people “start to believe it”.

“At every election since God was a boy that claim has been made and it has never been true,” Mr Hinds added.

With a Tory government operating for 44 of the 71 years the NHS has existed, he said “if something terrible was going to happen to it – it probably would have happened already”.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has called on the next government to focus on the NHS after it warned patients to expect “huge waits” in emergency departments as the NHS braces for its “worst-ever” winter.

Labour’s East Hampshire prospective parliamentary candidate this week blamed Conservative policies for the crisis hospitals are facing.

Gaynor Austin told the Herald she has “experienced first hand” the “appalling strain placed on services by contracting out and cuts in funding”.

She spoke of waiting “over five hours in A&E” on a Wednesday afternoon for her daughter to be put on a “life-saving drip”, which was eventually administered with her lying “on a sofa in an empty room”.

The government “policy of underfunding the NHS” has stopped the service from “raising its capacity to match patient demand”.

“Consequently the NHS is forced to rely on the private sector for help providing core services,” she said. “Labour will repair the damage caused by the Tories’ deliberate running down of the NHS, bring services back into public control and protect it from Boris Johnson’s sell out Brexit deal with Donald Trump.”