The plaque in the entrance hall said Lyme Regis Community Centre, and was dated 1994. Then it became ‘medical practice’, and five years ago it went online as ‘medical centre’. After years of practice, the GPs had finally earned the right to be a centre. Not necessarily of excellence though: on the whole, it became more of a business centre.

This was when we were all being told that GPs were really Alan Sugar with a stethoscope: hungry, hip-hop, tuned in, and ready to turn primary medicine into national chain groups offering everything from acupuncture and pilates to gym workouts and a diet-saints’ restaurant. But what happened in Lyme Regis was that the best doctor there got bogged down in strategic business planning, and then fell out with the others, who one day taped up his filing cabinets and escorted him from the premises.

It was all very exciting for the local papers, but not for the patients who had been redefined as customers. Doctors came and went, more locums appeared, more people seemed to be working 1.5 days freelance across three practices, more prescriptions got cocked up, and more complaints were made. The local Tories said it was all the NHS’s fault – too much bureaucracy – but before the row could go to penalties, Virgin pitched up and bought it. Now its Virgin Medicare.

On the noticeboard – where once there were signs about inspecting stools and rummaging around in your tits – there are now classic examples of corporate bullsh*t. We want your feedback! Meet the Practice staff! Get involved in our mutual wellbeing! And the obligatory strap-line down at the bottom: Care good enough for your families. Oh dear. Not good enough for corporates, Sir Humphreys, BUPA or Virginia Bottomley, but for your families – aah, then of course it’s good enough for you. We do want your feedback – we really do – we just don’t want to get your prescription right, or tell you when it’s ready.

Since Virgin took over, the two remaining good doctors have left. One of them was mine, but they didn’t bother to tell me. So I rang for an appointment four days in advance: “Sorry, no, there aren’t any – but you can see the Nurse Practitioner”. So I did. I was only there for a prescription review. I waited for twenty minutes. The lady weighed me, and asked if I ever felt dizzy or had headaches. “Only during and after alcohol,” I quipped. She wasn’t a great audience. I left.

What I’d experienced was what I’ve interfaced with for over thirty years now from the private sector per se: lack of compassion, lousy service, chiselling to give you the cheapest product delivery, and everything ultimately being down to “the customer”, not them. ,

I’ve sat and watched this happen over three decades – a one-time social democrat-cum-liberal who was fed up of Union bullies by 1975 – and gradually realised that the entire exercise has been a gigantic and costly failure. The country is bankrupt, the banks are insolvent, the investment in education, employees and utility infrastructure has been negligible, and our services are now easily the most expensive in Europe. The privatised railways nearly killed me in 1999, the water companies metered me and then left me at the mercy of standpipes two summers in three, the internally competitive health service forced me onto hopeless medication and kept telling me to ‘monitor’ everything from peripheral neuropathy to gout, the electricity companies ripped me off, and the gas/oil energy bastards screwed me on the refining cost three-card trick every year. Scottish Widows mis-sold me an income bond, and the financial advisors sat and raked in their loyalty commissions as my pension pile became almost homoaeopathic.

Then the banks got going with endless demands for me to take more credit, the central banks took my taxes to bail out bankers, the banks and bond markets clamped tight on the rates to zirp my investment income, and the local council rapidly got into doing less and less work at more and more cost. Finally, everyone screwed up bigtime, and overnight I became fair game: Rupert Murdoch began hacking my phone, Simon Cowell took to spoiling my view, and George Osborne said I had to pull in my belt and how dare I have a house abroad when Bob Diamond his mate was only on $5.5m bonus a year.

Last year, the HMRC wrote me a nasty letter asking what on earth I thought I was doing selling my main residence without telling them. Soon after came another one telling me how much drawdown I could take from my personal pension pot. Huffington Post demanded to know what gave me the right to tell the truth in a comment thread, The Guardian unpersoned me for writing the truth about Gordon Brown’s health, Twitter banned me for asking Ed Balls a perfectly reasonable question, and Google banned me for “internet abuse” without ever explaining it. To this day I still don’t even know who I’d abused, let alone how or when. I felt like changing my name by deed poll to Mr K. But then I just felt angrier and angrier.

I’ve only been back here five days, and already I’m angrier than Jeremy Hunt after narrowly missing a disabled council worker on a zebra crossing. So now here I am back in a ferry port, and there’s another plaque just inside the door. It says:

‘This Ferry terminal was opened by the Rt Honourable Vince Cable, Minister for Business Innovation and Skills on May 5^th 2011’

That was two and a half years ago, and the f**king place still doesn’t have wifi.

Disgusted, I went back to the car. And I thought for a few minutes about what we’ve gained from neoliberalist bollocks, and what we’ve lost.

We have gained a National debt equal to the one we had, in that we’ve added the two together. Things arrive more quickly, there are no phone party lines, we can say “Damn, it dropped the call” on mobile phones from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and we can use pcs, tablets, blackberries, Skype and a million other gadgets round the clock. (We can’t stop the batteries from running down, we can’t stop the software from being useless, and we can’t understand the instruction manuals – but hey, you can’t have everything).

We can watch digital satellite television from anywhere on the world. But not if there’s thick cloud, it’s raining, or a microbe has crawled into the dish receiver tube.

We can travel on trains with clean interiors, at speeds of up to 160 mph. But we need to reconfigure the mortgage in order to buy a ticket.

We have better houses, bigger mortgages, nicer kitchens, designer crockery, more advanced cars, higher loft apartments and quirkier properties. (In Kent, nobody lives in a house any more: they’re all snuggled up in Oast Houses and barns).

We have a greater choice of spin, deceit, lies, press propaganda, crap television, braindead looped news, jewellery channels, God channels, history channels, home makeover channels and moto-cross sky-diving snow-boarding channels than anywhere else in the world

And as of earlier this week, we have gained our own personal doctor when we reach 65. If he or she has any appointments left.

We have consistently and steadily lost share of world trade. We have lost any respect we had from the world for self-discipline, understatement, honesty, and a quiet but stoical nature. We have lost a car industry, a nuclear industry, an electricity-generating industry, a coal industry, a newspaper industry, a fishing industry, and all our varietal High Street communities in favour of charity shops and Tesco.

We have lost our privacy, our legal equality, our gruff and firm but fair police force, our freedom of speech, our nationality, our manufacturing base, our social order, our marriages, 37% of our countryside, our family meals, most of our buses and all of our docks. (See earlier re ‘loft apartments’).

We have lost our faith in clerics, doctors, bank managers, schoolteachers, Universities, standards, objectivity, morals, ethics, legislators, fathers, Councillors, coppers, lawyers, judges, sportsmen, senior business figures and the care home system. And we have lost an army of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and social workers. (We never had any faith in social workers in the first place).

As the Buddhists say, “All things are in transition”. They are indeed: so we are losing our public health services, our welfare services, our charities, our family businesses, our scientists, our entrepreneurs, our right to scrutinise the powerful, the control of our national destiny, and our innate sense of discernment.

Perhaps above all, we are losing any natural sense of dignity and restraint…towards ourselves, the rights and needs of others, or those who got a luckier Genes Bag than we did.

So there we are. The boat leaves in two hours for another country – where, in all fairness, some of the same things have also been lost. Just nowhere near as many as in the Land I once loved….and with a far stronger determination within the populace to deal with the scoundrels should this stream of brass-necked incompetence get any worse.

That country has not yet traded in low-cost freedom for expensive, larcenous dictatorship. We have. So too have Greece, Ireland, and ClubMed as a whole. I am a convinced Europhile who can see good in every culture on this continent. And I am a EUrophobe who cannot detect even a scintilla of worth in its inane, controlling, dumbassed bureaucrats.

I’m sorry to repeat myself, but my answer remains as it has been for six months now: I will return to England when England returns to its senses. And I will rediscover my love of country when England rediscovers its insistence on decency.

In the meantime, my aims are fivefold: to have a central base, to move the protest on and up, to present a moving target for the tax fiends, to write a book, and to keep on learning.