Labour (broadly defined) has replied in two ways to Steve Webb's revelations that 24000 jobs are about to go in the Health Service.

Yellow Peril says it isn't true:

Lib Dem's have had a rocket aimed at them as a result of their desperate attempts to get scare stories about the NHS in the media.

Jackie Ashley in the Guardian has another point of view: the problems are there, but it was Milburn wot done it:

Milburn will be remembered for many years for his long stint at health, where rampant instability now threatens as his erratic market goes live. Payment by results is exposing old debts he ignored, inflated by his incompetent contract that gave GPs a £20,000 rise by mistake. He encouraged his successor, John Reid, to forget debt in a dash for pre-election NHS targets regardless of cost, with a reckless £20,000 pay rise to consultants.

Milburn is a man for the broad idea, not complexity. That inattention to detail may cause more hospital closures, more sackings of staff and local uproar than is politically sustainable, as the NHS is market-tested to political destruction despite the highest spending ever. It was Milburn who provoked the needless ideological row over foundation hospitals (remember them?) while fatally ignoring the less glamorous purchasing role of primary care trusts.

I love that "he encouraged his successor" - in the finest showtrial tradition.

The sad thing is though, that Ashley is robably half-right on this. Market mechanisms might work. Central direction might just work. But lazily-defined market mechanisms combined with central direction have little chance of working.