The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Only family and real friends (not the kind who spring up to give teary quotes after you have popped your clogs) will take care of you in your old age. If the state lets you die, its agents will investigate each other and – surprise, surprise – find there is "no case to answer".

If a son or daughter had dropped the ball like the council in this case, would there be a case to answer then? If a private hospital had conducted its business as the NHS has, would heads roll? If a paedophile gang outside state employment had in effect organised a brothel staffed by children in their care as happened in North Wales when I was a boy there, would the Crown Prosecution Service have stayed its hand?

We are not dealing with double standards here. The standard is perfectly consistent. It's a standard that Magna Carta once abolished in Britain by elevating the Rule of Law over the Rule of Men. We benefited from it immensely for centuries as people planned and built their lives secure in the knowledge that the law governed the rulers as well as the ruled. But now the men of power – under the pretence of taking care of us "from the cradle to the grave" have subverted it. The law is now what they or their thugs and cronies say it is. And the proof is that they so rarely face the consequences of their wicked actions.

The social-democratic state is a self-legitimised criminal gang, living parasitically upon honest creators of wealth, whether they are business-people or their employees. If anyone tells you to the contrary, be they leader or led, that only tells you they are a member.