I was recently in hospital and took the opportunity, this being the season of goodwill, to read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and have to say I was greatly disappointed.

Having lately seen the error of my ways, and understood that David Cameron went to a very posh school and a very posh university not because he's rich and has been since 1066 but because he's much, much cleverer than chaps like you and me and therefore clearly the right man to run the country, I naturally saw Ebenezer Scrooge as a classic hero - until that is he bottled out and started undermining competitiveness by giving away turkeys to the poor.

Heroes do tend to let you down, don't they?

Cameron himself is not immune to this charge.

His policies are definitely steps in the right direction, but to work they need to be made consistent.

Take the massive reductions in benefits.

Obviously I applaud these because like everyone else I know that people on benefits are scroungers, and nobody likes a scrounger.

However, not nearly enough has been done about the so-called health service.

This clearly hasn't been thought through.

If these people are losing 30 per cent of their already laughable incomes, then most of them are going to get very, very ill through inadequate diets, lack of heating, lack of appropriate clothes and sheer boredom.

Despite the recent welcome reforms, Britain's NHS is still a heavily socialised system, which in plain English means that you, I and all the other non-scroungers have to pay the bills for the feckless when their foul habits catch up with them.

The net saving from cutting benefits will therefore be somewhere from limited to non-existent.

The only way to change this is to abolish socialised medicine altogether and make everyone pay the full whack when they get ill.

If they can't pay, well, let's face it, they won't be missed.

What happens, in any case, if through our generosity and stupidity we enable these people to survive?

The next thing you know they've reached pensionable age and, as they've never done a day's work in their lives, or at least never earned enough to pay much in the way of tax or national insurance, you and I will have to pay their pensions too.

First of all we keep the indigent alive by giving them free medical care, then we keep them alive even longer by handing them loads of dosh that they can spend on getting ill again.

We even give their brats a free education. This was all very well when we needed a literate workforce, but now we've got one - in South Korea, for example - what's the point in forking out?

Beyond that, of course, because many of these so-called "people," obsessed by their "rights," which they insist include the "right to eat," end up in prison, where they get free accommodation, food, education and goodness knows what else.

The only way to deal with this nonsensical situation is to get rid of all of these nanny state handouts.

No point at all in cutting benefits if you're then going to have to cover these sorts of costs.

It's time to stop pussyfooting around and make some tough choices.

Abolish the health service and make everyone pay for treatment.

That way, the problem of the scrounging poor will gradually disappear, by a process of what might be called "natural wastage."

Get rid of state pensions, which should shave off a few more.

And stop giving children an education unless their parents can pay for it.

This will free up a cheap labour force, enabling Britain to regain its competitiveness.

This could be boosted, moreover, by making prisoners work for their keep. Cheshire once had a thriving salt industry, for example, killed off no doubt by outrageous wage demands from communist unions bent on destroying the nation.

Broken rocks could make very popular garden features, and the newly privatised postal service will need to invest in lots of mail bags.

Thanks to Thatcher's industrial cleansing, we don't need to worry about protests from unions anymore.

And as the government is about to take us out of the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights we won't need to worry about whingeing foreign judges either.

Now all of this is already being achieved elsewhere.

Greece is getting rid of all of this bleeding heart nonsense.

It's a shameful fact that such a country should be ahead of Britain in modernising its economy in this way, but it needed the EU to make it do it.

That's all very well if you're Greek, but we British surely don't need a bunch of Eurocrats to tell us how to trash our own country.

Must dash now. Just had a call from the hospital.

Apparently my brain fell out following an MRI scan and they've only just found it in the freezer cabinet in the junior doctors' common room.

An anaesthetist was about to pop it in the microwave when, despite not having had any sleep for three years, he spotted that it wasn't a Waitrose Aberdeen Angus Quarter-Pound Beef Burger and sounded the alarm.

Good job it wasn't an NHS hospital. Bet they wouldn't have found it at all.

Have a great 2014!