Mr William Hague has gone on the offensive over Labour's handling of the public services following the threat by Britain's family doctors to quit the National Health Service en masse.
The Conservative leader said the threatened "collapse" of the service was "a very serious indictment" of the government's policies.
The British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, last night insisted that the "big choice" voters faced next Thursday was between continued Labour investment and Tory cuts.
However, Mr Blair was battling against a torrent of criticism from education and medical professionals which saw his "crusade" for schools and hospitals blown off-course for the second successive day.
He was not helped, either, by an intervention from Mr Tony Benn warning that "New Labour" could face a powerful backlash from left-wing MPs in the next parliament.
The British Medical Association threw its firecracker into the middle of the election campaign, confirming the results of a survey suggesting 20,000 of the United Kingdom's family doctors are prepared to resign in 10 months' time unless the government delivered "significant and acceptable" reforms to their employment contract.
The BMA had asked all 36,000 general practitioners if they would be prepared to submit an undated resignation letter next April if the government failed to agree significant changes to the GP contract.
Of the two thirds of doctors who replied to the survey, almost nine out of ten - 86 per cent - said they would be prepared to quit.
The disclosure of these shock findings followed Thursday's "double-whammy" for Mr Blair over health and education. First the head of the BMA's consultants' group, Dr Peter Hawker, said the NHS was providing a level of care he would not wish on his own family. Then the leader of the National Head Teachers' Association, Mr David Hart, likened Britain to a Third World country as it "scoured the world" for teachers and said the situation in parts of London was approaching "meltdown."
Following yesterday's announcement Dr Hamish Meldrum, deputy chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, said primary care was "on the edge of collapse" and that GPs had felt like "the cinderellas of the health service for some time."
He stressed this was "not really a party political matter" and said successive governments had failed to address the situation.
However, while Labour's election manifesto pledges 10,000 more doctors overall, Dr Meldrum said this would probably means no more than 2,000 extra general practitioners in four or five years time.
"We believe that is nowhere near enough to deliver a proper service now, far less deliver the commitments Labour made in the NHS Plan," he told the BBC's World at One programme.
On the same programme Dr Mike Oliver from Stafford echoed the complaint of a "grotesque imbalance" between time, facilities and resources available, and the service expected.
The Health Secretary, Mr Alan Milburn, immediately offered doctors' leaders a timetable for negotiations on the new contract, while admitting the negotiation itself would not be easy. And Mr Blair turned the fire back on the Conservatives as he appealed for more time to boost investment in hospitals and schools.
Campaigning in Merseyside, Mr Blair said: "When we hear the frustrations and concerns of people who work in the health service we know there is more to do. The answer is to keep the investment coming in and never go back to the days of Tory cuts and selling-off essential parts of the service."
But Mr Hague claimed morale in Britain's public services had hit "rock bottom" and said it was "time to give the National Health Service back to the professionals."
Mr Benn, meanwhile, claimed the "pendulum" had swung back sharply in favour of environmental controls and publicly financed services, and that Mr Blair's "honeymoon" period with "traditional" Labour MPs was over.
"I think the Parliamentary Labour Party will now become much stronger in pressing its policy requests and arguments and I think the government will have to concede to them," he said.