Who can we trust with the NHS?

The scandal of Stafford Hospital has spread out to others, with more patients being taken to Wolverhampton and Walsall for care due to a shortage of staff.

The brand of Stafford has been tainted.

Politicians are using it as a stick to beat each other with. The Tories hold it up as an example of why Labour is no longer fit to oversee its own greatest achievement, the NHS itself, while Labour points to the downgrade of Stafford as an example of how the Tories can't be trusted with it.

Stafford itself is a marginal constituency. Conservative Jeremy Lefroy has been campaigning as hard as anyone could for the hospital, but could well be punished if his pleas are falling on deaf ears with his own party.

His Labour opponent Kate Godfrey has already told him to stand down and force a by-election to put Stafford at the top of the agenda.

Amid the typical red v blue row, an alternative emerges.

Karen Howells, a founding member of the Support Stafford Hospital campaign that has been camped out on the lawn of the site to fight the planned downgrade, is standing for the National Health Action party.

It might well be a one-issue party, but in Stafford it also happens its one issue is the biggest one.

And it would be foolish to write the party off as a wasted vote.

One of its founders is Dr Richard Taylor, who was elected as an independent in Wyre Forest not once but twice.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives can afford to write Stafford off. There is still little between them in the opinion polls and the key marginals that changed hands in 2010 are the ones that will determine who gets to run the country.

Labour failed to stop the scandal of poor care at Stafford. The Tories and Lib Dems failed to turn it into the perfect example of a 21st century NHS.

The people camped out at the hospital might have their own individual political preferences. But what they want most of all is their local hospital to be safe.

Now who will promise them that?

Damned if they do, damned if they don't

Leave it to the voting public to decide how much MPs get paid and the answer would probably be 'nothing'.

Indeed there are probably quite a few people who would say the only reward for being in the Commons should be to return to the constituency on a Friday, standing on the train next to the toilets, to be greeted with a set of stocks and a punnet of rotten tomatoes.

So they were all prepared for a fair amount of grumbling over the recommended hike in their pay. Simply put, they don't deserve it at a time of austerity, particularly when other public servants have endured a freeze.

The problem is they didn't decide they should get it. That was the verdict of the independent body set up to regulate their pay because so many of them couldn't be trusted not to treat the taxpayer like their own personal piggy bank.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was created to stop them deciding what they should get.

And now it's come to a decision they're being told to intervene and overrule it, which sort of defeats the whole object.