A group of doctors and public health experts, disillusioned by the government’s changes to the NHS, are setting up a new political party because they don’t think that any of the existing parties defend the health service effectively and they want a more prominent voice.

The National Health Action Party is the idea of the oncologist Clive Peedell, who ran 260 km in six days from Aneurin Bevan’s statue in Cardiff to the Department of Health headquarters in London earlier this year to protest against the Health and Social Care Bill and NHS privatisation.1

He will lead the party jointly with the former MP Richard Taylor, a retired consultant …