Yesterday, my wife and I visited a 90 year old friend in the geriatric ward of our nearby hospital. All the patients have available to them to get through a boring day in the ward (and to obliterate the memory of the last appalling meal) is television. This hospital requires you to buy TV time – £5 for 8 hours viewing. Most of the old lady pensioners were in a bad way. We had to work out how to pay for 8 hours TV for our friend, a tennis fan who was anxious to watch the finals of Wimbledon.

So the British government now allows private firms to make money out of sick old ladies in hospital by charging them for watching the BBC coverage of Wimbledon. Watching the BBC in the UK requires the payment of an annual licence fee of £145.50, but if you are over 75 this fee is waived. The patients in that ward, all over 75, are asked to pay £5 for 8 hours for a service the BBC offers free to the healthy elderly. Moreover, getting the elaborate TV working required a credit card and a level of technical savvy that none of the old ladies clearly had.

It is not the government that is making money out of this service; it has to be a politically connected private company. Were Epicurus alive today he would condemn this petty and shameful exploitation of sick, old people.

They say that the British people are losing that icon of decency and civilisation, the National Health Service without a whimper or a single barricade. Our insight into the workings of the NHS was minor, compared with the grand, overall destruction being carried out by this radical government. The people responsible should be ashamed of themselves.