There was something rather melancholy about the hospital march through Canterbury on Saturday. It lacked the tub-thumping reverie of the hospital marches of two decades ago.

It was then that the campaign group Concern for Health in East Kent (Chek), organiser of Saturday’s event, was born.

That reminds us: we’ve been here before. In fact, we’re always here. The NHS seems locked in perpetual crisis with no way out.

The reason Chek has been resurrected is because of the serious threat to services at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital.

I’d love to see a fully functioning hospital in Canterbury – I just don’t think the National Health Service can provide it. Approaching its 70th birthday, the NHS is struggling with the 21st century world. Today’s NHS crisis isn’t economic or organisational – it is existential.

The question we ought to be asking ourselves isn’t how we can save the NHS, but rather how we can replace it.

More importantly, we must ask ourselves how we can remove politics from the provision of healthcare. For far too long the NHS has become the plaything of governments and politicians who exploit it to burnish their own images.

And yet they prove time and again that the NHS is fundamentally incapable of providing the healthcare the nation requires.

Yet all we hear is “the NHS needs more money”. But who’s going to pay for it? The last people I want spending more of my money for me are politicians and bureaucrats who I know from bitter experience will use it badly.

There is one reason above all others why healthcare provision in this country cannot progress to proper reform: politics. It is regarded as electoral suicide to even suggest for a second that there might be an alternative to a National Health Service.

Look at the way that every political party made sure it had a presence at Saturday’s march through Canterbury, which looked like a solemn act of worship.

It is spoken of in terms such as “hallowed” and “sacred” while frontline medical staff are referred to as “saints”. All this is the language of faith.

It’s not that the treatment we get on the NHS is substandard – it’s that trying to access it is routinely impeded by a constipated bureaucracy. If we want a first-rate hospital in Canterbury then we must be willing to accept that it won’t be one provided by the NHS.

It might be heresy but someone has to say it: It’s time to scrap the NHS.

Read the full version of this column in the Gazette.