DUH … that was my response to hearing a Radio 4 report last week about the Westminster Government announcing a wholesale review of the provision of food to patients in hospitals in England. They’ve enlisted yet another celebrity chef, Prue Leith, to sort out the perpetual crisis in hospital catering there, the most recent being a listeria outbreak.

This review will, wait for it, look at whether there might be more chance of patients being served up a tasty, healthy and nutritious meal if it’s cooked on the premises rather than hundreds of miles away, then chilled and transported and incinerated on the ward before it’s dolloped on a plate. We could have told them that years ago. And we did.

I used to work in Rutherglen Maternity Hospital – before it was closed because it wasn’t considered big enough to be sustainable. When I started, it still had a kitchen of its own on site. The NHS employed chefs and kitchen staff to cook the food. Women were given menu cards. They could choose from a variety of plain but tasty home cooked-style meals and the kitchen would serve them up to order. Some dishes were so popular, there was a scramble by staff to finish off any leftovers. The food, like the hospital, was homely, warm and comforting.

When Rutherglen shut, I moved to Rottenrow in the centre of Glasgow – it also still had a kitchen on site, and a busy staff restaurant serving the same food as the patients got. The furniture was basic. It was a canteen. But the food was welcome, and it was cheap.

Then Rottenrow shut and I moved to the spanking new Princess Royal Maternity in 2001 – on the site of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary – where the catering, portering and cleaning had been put out to tender and privatised. French multinational Sodexo was in charge. The staff restaurants and cafes had been done up to look more attractive. But the food was cheap and tasteless. The old kitchens at the Royal had been ripped out and it no longer even had the facility to cook for patients on site. The patients were now being served food that had been cooked and chilled in Wales, transported hundreds of miles and then, to make sure any of the bacteria that had had time to grow on the journey were eradicated, reheated to the point of being unrecognisable as well as too hot for frail and elderly patients to eat. The spin was that it was just like ready meals and just as tasty and healthy as food cooked on site. All that flew in the face of the evidence patients saw on their plates: often a dollop of inedible, irradiated mush.

The truth was that this was nothing to do with trying to make sure unwell people were tempted by tasty food to help them recover – this was all about skimming as much profit off the mush as possible. Workers’ pay and terms and conditions eroded. Staff numbers were cut. Standards slipped. Private profit meant less money for the actual food, nutrients and quality of preparation.

And we told them so. Staff, trade unions, patients, relatives were unanimous. Much of the food was inedible. Many patients simply didn’t eat it. And malnutrition, particularly for longer-term patients, became a real problem.

And it wasn’t just the catering services that were run disgracefully. At the time, I was the Unison trade union branch secretary covering all hospitals in North Glasgow.

I remember highlighting in the media the fact that two workers were having to shift 10 tonnes of linen a day, a job that had previously been carried out by eight people.

Hygiene was a nightmare because of the shortage of cleaners. Cockroaches were starting to infest some parts of the building. Piles of rubbish on the stairs posed a fire hazard to patients and staff.

It all came to a head when Sodexho staff at the Royal Infirmary went on strike for better pay. They won. In the course of the strike negotiations, it became apparent just how much profit was being generated at the cost of reduced staff numbers and service to patients.

It was great that we won a pay increase for low-paid staff who were run ragged round the clock. But the private sector was still in charge. I called for Sodexho to be sacked and the contracts bought back in house. But the Labour-LibDem coalition in power at Holyrood was not interested. Malcolm Chisholm, the health minister was always decent, fair – and I had the distinct impression that he was sympathetic to bringing these contracts back into the public sector.

But down south, Tony Blair and his health secretary Alan Milburn were on a crusade to open up whole new sectors of the English NHS to private companies. No way was the Scottish Labour machine – Blairite to the marrow of its bones – going to defy its lords and masters in London.

Eventually, Sodexho lost the contract, and everything was brought back in house. But the next time Richard Leonard bleats about the state of the Scottish NHS, he needs reminded in no uncertain terms that his party failed abysmally to stand up against the private profiteers when it had the power to do so.

It was not until October 2008 that the then health secretary Nicola Sturgeon announced that private contractors would henceforth be banned from bidding for catering and cleaning contracts in Scottish hospitals. The end of the NHS in privatisation was delivered by an SNP government after eight years of Labour inertia. People and political parties must be judged not by what they say but by what they do.

When I heard the Today programme reporting that Prue Leith had been tasked with ensuring that patients receive food that is produced locally and cooked on site or nearby, thus halting the processions of juggernauts that trundle across the motorway network every day laden with nutrition-free slush, I could have choked on the irony.

When, almost two decades ago, we questioned the competency and efficiency of the private contractors we were dismissed by managers and certain politicians as Luddites, incapable of understanding that private entrepreneurs would literally bring innovation and dynamism to the table. Now that they’ve been proven wrong on food, maybe one of these days they’ll even start to agree that the NHS should be a profit-free zone, run for the benefit of patients rather than for the enrichment of shareholders.