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My mother had two slots, each longer than 15 minutes, when carers would call at her home, where she was dying, and help. It wasn’t even close to long enough.

So my father tried to fill in the gaps in care, though he was in his late 70s. He wanted his wife of 49 years to be in her home. He believed that if she had an end to face, it should be there, where their lives had been.

My mother, scared, had the comfort of familiar things as a shield against the illness that was claiming her. In her home, she had her pictures, her clothes, her furniture, her neighbours – most of all, her dog.

So she and Dad struggled on. By the time we persuaded Dad that he really couldn’t give any more, he weighed less than seven stones and was, his GP said, at risk.

Throughout, we tried to get more help for Mum to stay at home. It was denied. Dad, a retired bus driver, and Mum, a retired nurse, had their own three-bed home and some savings. This made them unfit for help.

So. Should I leave my partner and small children (then 5 and 3) to care for her? I did not. My sister was herself fighting illness, though she tried to stave off the inevitable, at cost to herself.

So. For want of care in her home, Mum, weeping, was taken to a stranger’s home and laid in a dead stranger’s bed. The guilt of this haunts us all still.

Quickly, which was merciful, she lost the will to carry on. Actually, it cost more for the state to keep mum in a nursing home than to pay carers to look after her in her own home, even after the state dipped its paws into my parents’ savings. But because mum so quickly lost the will to live, she generously saved the system some money, which is, after all, what the system cares about. She would have been 71 last week.

One day I’ll tell the rest of the story but for now, I would just like to note, for just one illustration of the awfulness of this situation, that in the 15 minutes a carer spends looking after somebody in need, the executive of one of the privatised utility companies is paid (not ‘earned’; never ‘earned’) £225.

And people wonder why I get so incandescently angry.

A very old joke

I love it when the politicians defend the consequences of their hate-filled policies: the “here-today, gone-tomorrow” party hacks try to gainsay the considered views of genuine experts in their fields, who owe their appointments to skill in a discipline, not political preferment.

On one side of the debate today, the Leonard Cheshire Foundation. Two-thirds of councils now limit social carers’ visits to sick and elderly and disabled people in their homes to just 15 minutes. The Foundation, having conducted extensive and exhaustive research, authoritatively concluded that 15-minute visits by carers to elderly and disabled people do not give enough time to provide for the needs of the vulnerable.

(We don’t even need the research, really, do we? All of us who have cared for elderly or disabled people in any way, even if only for a day, know that everything you do with them takes twice as long, and needs to – hurrying a visit to the loo, for example, is anything from dangerous (the risk of falls) to frightening (the fear of incontinence) and on all levels, damaging to people’s health. And, of course, a carer hurrying from job to job, watching the clock, is going to be stressed, under pressure and finding his or her job very difficult indeed.)

On the other side of the debate today, minister Norman Lamb. His government’s cuts to local authorities have added to this fresh injustice visited upon the most needy in our society. His argument? “We are proposing an amendment to the Care Bill which would make it clear that councils would have to consider a person’s well-being when arranging their care”. Weasel. What else do councils do when arranging care than consider somebody’s well-being? Councils need money, not fatuous evasion.

So whose side are we on, then? Norman Lamb or the Leonard Cheshire Foundation?

The Leonard Cheshire Foundation is the blameless charity that works for the disabled, named in honour of the great VC-winning war hero and philanthropist Leonard Cheshire. I can see the Daily Mail headline now: ‘Leonard Cheshire hated Britain’.

What a bunch of liars and cheats they all are. And no, that’s not just abuse. Well, alright, it is, but there’s evidence a-plenty to back it up.

The Government, according to financial analysts today, has undervalued Royal Mail by £1 billion in selling off just over half of it. Could that be because city banks and hedge funds have the right to buy 70% of the shares, perhaps?

Naturally, state ownership having turned the Royal Mail into a profitable business, we’ll at least get some tax back, right? Er, no. A report today explains how creative accounting will be able to use historic losses to save the privatised company from paying any tax for ten years. So the money we paid to make it profitable won’t be repaid. At all.

Still, at least privatising the Royal Mail will save the taxpayer from the burden of its pension funds, for example… Er… Look, do you really need me to go on?

After all, we all know what happens when the dead hand of the private sector gets hold of something that used to work well enough. The Government privatised the Army’s recruitment wing in March. The number of new recruits has dropped by a third. The number of new officers signing up has dropped by nearly half. The Government’s £440 million outsourcing deal, to an organisation called Capita, was aimed at saving money!

Capita, by the way, has more than £3 billion of outsourcing work from the Conservative Government. Its £1.5 million in donations to the Conservative party must count, then, as money well spent. Were things any different when Labour had hands on the purse strings? What do you think £1 million in party donations says?

Sam Laidlaw, the head of British Gas owner Centrica, is part of Cameron’s Business Advisory Group. Tara Singh, Centrica’s former public affairs manager (or PR chief, if you prefer, so she obviously knows a lot…) has joined No 10 as Cameron’s personal adviser on – you’ll laugh! – on climate change.

Many of the leading energy firms have staff on secondment in Whitehall; but movement goes the other way too. Former Tory MP Angela Knight now heads Energy UK, which represents energy suppliers and providers, and has been among the loudest of the voices protesting against Ed Miliband’s proposal to lever their stinking snouts out of the trough.

Look at the figures and you’ll see why they’re all such friends – and why they’re so scared of decent, fair, left-wing policies: the combined profits of the big six energy companies in 2012 came to £3.7 billion.

A joke, isn’t it? But a joke as old as England, if you read the history books.

I guess what democratic socialists like me – even Marxists, too – always believed was that this could be changed. I still believe that. The growing wave of outrage and revulsion at the sheer incompetence, the unashamed greed and the horrific cost to the people of the Tories’ version of the free market suggests to me that some change is on the way.

Bring it on

I loved the letter in The Independent that commented on the right’s tiresome scare tactic that Red Ed Miliband wants to “take us back to the 1970s”.

The writer said: “In the 1970s we had a steel industry, we made cars, ships, electronics and aircraft; there was high employment, we didn’t give bonuses for incompetence, regional television was regional and local radio was local. We hadn’t squandered the oil money, we hadn’t wasted billions on illegal wars and banks were under control. Bring it on, Ed.”