In my fourth year at school, my form master told me that a man was an idiot who was not a rabid socialist in his youth and a hardened Tory in his old age.

The trouble with socialism is that it is not what it was.

You always knew where you stood with the Tories, who made no bones about being in politics for themselves. "Get us in, little man," they said, "and, after we have taken our cut, we may throw you a few scraps."

The Liberals wanted more than their fair share of the pickings but didn't say so.

They were prepared to throw scraps to the lower echelons because many of them felt uneasy in church on Sunday mornings so they espoused minorities with po-faced piety.

"Nay, but nay lad," the socialists, who always came from t'North said. "We are int' for thee boy, en't right missus?" But they aren't.

They are in it for themselves with a vengeance.

So well and good, but don't try to pretend otherwise, young man, because you have been sussed.

Now, with more time on their hands than they know what to do with, other than play golf, they are getting bit-time ideology.

No smoking or getting fat or you get kicked out of the NHS.

In my time, we knew tobacco was addictive but smoked partly as an anodyne against the vicissitudes of life which exist no longer in the Welfare State.

My dear old mum brought up nine children in the hardest of hard times. Not enough money to go round after Dad had been to the pub.

So, she was always "not hungry" at meal times. She ate very little and we accepted that it was because she was not hungry.

Were she alive today, there are socialists and others perhaps who would make her diet or forfeit medical care from an NHS doctor.

Those "socialists" would not proscribe themselves nor their families but would purchase private medical treatment from their overfed bank accounts. Same goes for the smokers.

If it were not for the fact we can smell a hypocrite a mile off, New Labour would stay in power forever.

Like the Tories, however, they will get too arrogant and get kicked out eventually.

That is, unless Tony Blair can get us into a Federal Europe pretty soon and disenfranchise the electorate.

-RJ Allam, Hurstpierpoint