That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicr… - Polly Toynbee

I think of two deaths. The last stages of my mother’s liver and bowel cancer were dreadful: don’t imagine morphine is a gentle floating away – it detaches the mind, but not always the pain, while blocking the gut until an undignified death, obsessed by constipation. By the time her state was bad enough to long for death, it was far too late for her plea to go to Dignitas in Switzerland: those who take that grim and expensive path to a desolate death room need to go early, long before life becomes insufferable.
Some people might never have reached that point, but fear accelerates their departure. My mother, despite good palliative care, begged her GP to help her die. It might have been done once upon a time, he said, but since Harold Shipman’s multiple murders of elderly patients, every ampoule is counted, making it far too dangerous for a doctor to do anything of the kind. "Oh, where’s Dr Shipman when you want him!" she said to him, with what was left of her laugh. So she suffered on needlessly to the bitter end, and we suffered with her helplessly.

[At HMP Styal, a women's prison in Cheshire, near Manchester] Since mental hospitals began to shed their patients into what is euphemistically called the community, the prison ranks have swelled to accommodate them.

This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester's civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them.
The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on "no-fault" section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been.