When you're fit and healthy and in work everything seems relatively rosy. It's when you, or someone close to you, gets sick, or you lose your job that the rotteness reveals itself.

When my Dad was enduring his last illness the medical staff were either reluctant to discuss him with my brothers and I ("patient confidentiality") or we got a variety different stories from the seemingly endless members of staff (a different one every time) that we met. You would think that no elderly person had ever got ill before! On the other hand we only met one social worker - who demanded that we force him to sell his house and get him into a nursing home as soon as possible.

One of my best mates died recently from C. difficile - which he caught in hospital. I watched him deteriorate before my eyes ...

When I was made redundant, a couple of years ago, I 'signed on'. I then found myself in a Kafkaesque situation in which I had to report every two weeks to people who never seemed to have encountered an unemployed person before but had vaguely heard of them and knew them to be beneath contempt. I was forced to undergo this fortnightly ordeal in order to receive a monthly National Insurance stamp. They couldn't pay me any 'Job Seeker's Allowance' because of I was receiving a miniscule pension - but that didn't stop them sending me letters inviting me to attend interviews and threatening to stop my £0 per month JSA if I refused! I turned up to four of these interviews to find each one had been cancelled when I got there.

Now Mr Brown is stealing an even bigger chunk of the aforersaid miniscule pension. At the same time he seems prepared to sacrifice millions of pounds in tax in order to avoid offending various 'fat cats' and billionaire 'non-doms'.

F*ck Tony Blair and f*ck Gordon Brown and f*ck the Labour Party! All they've succeeded in doing is condemning us to another two or three decades of Tory misrule!