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What a party week it was for those vandals at the gates. They must have been doing whatever it is that vandals do when they can’t quite believe their luck. Normally, when their hordes descend, naked bodies painted in garish woad, waving their great big weapons, townsfolk flee – or at least lock the gates. Now, the townsfolk fling open the gates, chuck them the keys and hand over their goods, chattels and any virgins left hanging about.

Today is the day that reforms to our welfare system make poor people pay for the excesses of the rich; in a world where bankers spend their bonuses on a comfy little country hideaway full of rooms that are empty nine-tenths of the year, the poor now have to hand over money if they dare have so much as a spare room in their hovel.

My grandparents grew up in overcrowded squalor, kids shoved into tiny rooms like sardines. They and their generation fought and died so that their children and their children’s children would have better lives. And now their children’s children aren’t allowed so much as a spare square inch to play games in.

What makes me so angry is that vandals like smug rich kid Gideon Osborne, hairless rich kid David Cameron, lizard-like rich kid Iain Duncan Smith and brainless rich kid Michael Gove are so happy about it. Their drooling ventriloquist’s dummy of a party chair, the 12-year-old Grant Shapps, points his goofy teeth at the camera and dribbles inanities while his rich chums scoff and chuckle like pigs at a trough, laughing at the funny poor people just as kids laugh at the chimps in the zoo.

I know full well that real men, like the generation that fought for the world that made these ungrateful dullards so comfortable, would know what to do with such rubbish. 

It seems all too appropriate that Gove wants a national curriculum that teaches history by getting kids to recite names and dates: because vandals like Gove and his chums very much do not need children to know the truth about this nation’s past, the truth my grandparents knew – the truth that we are strongest when we are together, the truth that given hope, people can build a better world, the truth that when health, wealth and opportunity are shared, people have better lives. Imagine: if the children of today ever find those truths out, where would Cameron and his rich friends be? Treated like my grandparents would treat them: as something they trod in.

Who would ever have believed it possible that the military organisation responsible for saving people’s lives – that’s right, saving people’s lives – would be handed over to a Texas businessman? Who would ever have believed a British government would decide it didn’t want to afford to save people lives – that’s right, save people’s lives – and would leave it up to a US version of Securitas?

That’s what has happened. This country’s air / sea search and rescue service, for which thousands of Navy and Air Force men and women have risked their lives, which thousands of people have to thank for their very lives, has been handed over to the private sector.

What utter contempt for the brave people who have served for so many decades. What utter contempt for the lives of people.

The Tories who have committed this disgusting act of vandalism on a grand part of this nation’s heritage, on a service of which this nation could be so passionately proud, on a service which gave employment and training in such vital areas of expertise to so many, say the private sector works.

Oh does it?

Ask a big six energy firm customer whether the private sector works. Ask somebody with a bust broadband whether the private sector works. Ask security teams at the Olympics whether the private sector works. Ask bus passengers whether the private sector works. Ask rail passengers whether the private sector works. Ask bank customers whether the private sector works. Ask the taxpayers bailing out the banks whether the private sector works. Ask people who can’t afford dental treatment whether the private sector works.

At least the timing of this particular hideous trashing of our national character was appropriate. It was a great week for the vandals to celebrate taking a big blunt instrument to a vital part of the nation’s infrastructure, for it was the 50^th anniversary of the publication of the Beeching Report.

Because politicians of the time were unable to see beyond the tips of their own booze-raddled red-veined noses, our railway infrastructure was destroyed to save money. Now, of course, we would give anything to have a decent public transport network, to have our branch railways back.

Then again, we must face facts: if we did still have our beautiful railways, they would soon be sold off to the first get-rich-quick sinister Russian oligarch to offer Gideon Osborne a few million in grubby rouble notes wrapped inside an old copy of Big Asian Jugs Monthly.

I could go on, but you get the point: the private sector does not work, especially when the product it is selling is either a monopoly or a public service. What will our Texan friends do, I wonder? Charge extra for lifting if the person plucked from the waves is a porker? Give a loyalty card discount to regular users like fishermen? Ask its helicopter crews to go on bonding exercises where they can pretend to be trees and hug each other to build team spirit? Given that the service will be American-run, I suppose we shall have to be grateful if the crews manage to get themselves to the right bloody ocean, never mind the poor sod waving from his sinking liferaft.

Perhaps those of us who do not go to sea will be able to find out more easily in the new National Health Service the vandals have created from today. We all know that ever since the private sector was allowed inside the defences of the NHS, the story has been one of triumph after triumph – better patient care, shorter queues, easier access to life-saving drugs, better standards of care and hygiene, better standards of cleanliness and comfort. Yes, since Thatcher introduced the joys of competition to the health service, we all know exactly what has been achieved.

Our local GP, who last week sensibly fled to Australia, told the local newspaper how he regretted the demise of the co-operative public sector GPs’ out-of-hours emergency service in Cornwall, KernowDoc. That service was handed over to the private sector, to Serco, and any patient in Cornwall will be happy to give you their view of how successful that change has been.

And this week the vandals insist that GPs spend less time caring for people and more time on bureaucracy, more time on “buying” treatment and care for their patients: you will have heard the phrase a million times now. GPs will not “give” treatment, “provide” care; they will “buy” it. Though Gove’s education service will deny it, words do matter.

Selling birthrights for a mess of potage does seem to be the new national obsession. The BBC has kissed goodbye to its own heritage, flogged the historic TV Centre despite the protests of staff, and is now busy pretending to be the bastard lovechild of Sky and Fox News, all flashing neon, busy sets, glamorous presenters and buried somewhere far, far inside, a tiny remaining smidgeon of public service broadcasting.

So… what a week for the vandals. Their victory seems complete. They have succeeded in getting us all to believe that poor people and immigrants are responsible for the mess we’re in and so must pay the price. They have succeeded in getting us all to forget that there are names for people who pick on the weak and defenceless, the foreign and different, names like ‘coward’ and ‘bully’. They have succeeded in getting us to look the other way while things of which we should be proud, things for which people fought and died, were given away to profit-makers.

On the debit side of their profit-and-loss ledger, which is all that these people-type beings care about, they have succeeded in uniting those bastions of conservatism, the churches, the doctors, the medical representatives, the headteachers, and many many more in total unanimity in declaring that the changes being proposed – to welfare, to the health service, to education – are insane.

But that’s all there is, for on the profit side there is the great, unavoidable truth that even though every educated, expert, caring voice in the country is united in opposition to what is going on, the people have still permitted it.

Today, as we watch the vandals running riot, we must all take a moment to be very proud of what we have done with the world we were given.