This is not my country ... is it?

Being English, there are many ideals that I believe my country should aspire to from freedom, equality, openness and meritocracy to a deep sense of fraternity. However, I increasingly feel this is not my country but some of social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. I happen to blame Milton Friedman and his acolytes but that's another story, another day.

I could labour on about the appalling state of social mobility in the UK, the reduction in civil liberties, the inequality of austerity measures when people like Jimmy Carr try to dodge taxes or the banker's scam over LIBOR for financial gain or even to the lack of social cohesion as we all slavishly follow the tune of TINA (there is no alternative) and submit ourselves to a "dog eat dog" mentality. Of course, dogs don't actually eat dogs but what's a bit of reality to the quasi scientific cult of monetarism that rules our financial institutions.

I thought I'd however discuss a more human story than LIBOR. A tale of an elderly couple.

One died a week ago, he was a drunk and eventually it killed this former World War II member of the Polish Air Force (well, that's what he always claimed). According to him, he had escaped Germany, walked across Europe, fought in the war alongside the British in the Polish Air Force and lost most of his family in concentration camps. I never had reason to doubt him.

He had settled in the UK, and with his wife they had worked hard all their lives (he as a self employed painter, she worked for British Gas). He often claimed to have painted Margaret Thatcher's house near Dulwich. Eventually, the couple retired to their council home with a small pension and almost no savings.

They never made a great deal of money and they could never afford to own a home. The one exception was when they bought their council home (under a government scheme) and then promptly sold it to a property agent. This netted them a small sum (£15,000 or so) but they were relatively hard up and it cost them their home and their community.

Before you judge, the practice of property agents buying up ex-council homes and financing this was rife. Have you never wondered how those expensive ex-council properties in London were cleared of the previous tenants? A bit of money to the hard up is a great way of creating an exodus. In general, the people who lost the most were the previous tenants - they lost community, friends and homes for a bit of cash.

So, they ended up in a new council estate having to play all sorts of dodgy games because the council wasn't supposed to give them a home as they could afford to buy a home (which they couldn't). They knew no-one, they were isolated and they already had a tendency to drink. This became the norm. A bottle of cheap special offer discounted supermarket whiskey for breakfast ... sounds the ticket.

Of course, their health deteriorated and a couple of trips to the hospital ensued for numerous conditions - strokes, emphysema, suspected heart attacks - you name it. The care was modest but usually involved some sort of merry go around about how quickly they could be got rid of. The Hospital wanted them out, Social services didn't want anything to do with them and they suggested the grand idea that one of their daughters - either the one who has a mental health condition or the other one who is in and out of hospital with cancer and chemotherapy - could look after two drunk octogenarians with medical complications who wanted to stay in their council home. So despite going into a home being the sensible option - the two were sent back home. Brilliant.

So, further hospital trips ensued and the family decided it was best if home help was hired (because no-one lives near them) and conveniently one was available who was apparently certified by social services and works as a home help for others. The rest of the family also mainly kept in contact by telephone because relationships were fraught ... a combination of trying to deal with two cantankerous old drunks with severe short term memory and other health issues is only made more complex when there's bad blood due to the past.

And so the situation continued for a decade in a state of limbo until the elderly gentleman died. The council house they lived in was found to be a pigsty and stunk to heaven of urine. The home help has allegedly helped herself to the entire of the £12,000 of the dubiously gotten savings the couple had and that appears to be about all the helping that happened. The house has also been fleeced of anything of value (though there wasn't much). What has actually happened here, we just don't know ... getting the truth from a drunk who can't remember who you are or that they've spoken to you thirty minutes ago is practically impossible.

A few days later, the surviving member of this couple was found rambling incoherently drunk in the middle of a large town at midnight and managed to put herself back in hospital. The Social Services said Mental Health will deal with her. Mental Health has said Social Services will deal with her and the Hospital is just trying to get rid of her.

Naturally, they are trying to get the daughters (i.e. one who has ongoing cancer, the other who is schizophrenic) to look after her - anything to avoid putting her into a home. The willingness of Social Services to save money by not providing care is as equally ferocious as the willingness of some Gov departments to waste vast sums of money on pointless IT projects.

In between this saga of social care, I read about more austerity, scumbags like Jimmy Carr trying to dodge taxes and the Bankers (who've already had loads of our taxpayers cash) scamming LIBOR.

At times like this, in my darkest moments, I think privately to myself "I want to see public flogging brought back". This tells me, something is going seriously wrong for me to get so angry with the way people behave that I can think such awful thoughts.

This tale is small fry compared to the suffering that goes on around the world but it's important to me. That elderly gentleman ... that was my grandfather.