LABOUR shadow health minister Andy Burnham vowed to thousands assembled in Trafalgar Square on Saturday to strike down the Tories’ health privatisation agenda.

Dozens of health campaigners and politicians lined up to greet the March for the NHS as it swarmed into the heart of the capital.

And Mr Burnham pledged to the Darlington mothers at its head that his agenda if Labour wins power at next year’s general election would be to stop the sell-off in its tracks.

“We will restore the right values back to the heart of the NHS that our party founded — compassion before competition, people before profit,” he declared.

The NHS would become the preferred provider of services, he would “insist on full exemption” for health from the EU-US TTIP free trade deal and would repeal the 2012 Health and Social Care Act that has opened the door to massive privatisation.

“The fight for the future of the NHS is happening now — right here,” he said.

“It will only get louder.”

Campaigning journalist Owen Jones branded the marchers “a people’s army.”

He said: “This is our people’s army that has marched throughout history — united throughout the centuries by a common courage and a common sense of solidarity.”

But the scale of the challenge was laid bare by Tower Hamlets Save our Surgeries campaigner and local GP Dr Virginia Patania.

“For less than the price it costs to insure a guinea pig for a year we are asked to provide services to some of the country’s most challenging patients,” she said.

“The 2012 Health and Social Care Act has failed us.

“Hundreds of GPs face closure. Twenty-two in east London. Thirty-six in London. A hundred nationally.”