Is it just me, or is everyone getting as mad as hell at the cavalier attitude of Government, squandering our money on people who have no right to it?

The latest example of its profligacy concerns the NHS, asylum seekers and the hugely-expensive IVF (in vitro fertilisation) treatment for infertility.

There are areas of Britain where childless couples are being denied the treatment which could bring them children because the local health authority has decided it cannot afford to pay.

Happily, it is not the case in Brighton.

It costs £2,000 for each treatment and couples may have to try more than once.

It is one of the worst examples of the 'postcode lottery' in the NHS. Some desperate couples have sold their homes or taken out large bank loans to pay privately for the treatment.

However, the Department of Health has made the incomprehensible decision that asylum seekers, many of them bogus, must all receive precisely the same care and access to facilities as British citizens.

It has now been revealed that dozens of asylum seekers, particularly from Albania, the former Yugoslavia and the Baltic states have already received such treatments.

Sensibly, one of our leading fertility specialists, Professor Ian Craft, has said asylum seekers should be refused IVF treatment.

He also described it as a national disgrace that there should be a postcode lottery for fertility care for British citizens.

Apart from the basic £2,000 per treatment for IVF, the process is much more expensive for asylum seekers. Interpreters can cost £300 a day.

We like to think we live in a civilised country and everyone, including asylum seekers, bogus or not, should have basic health care, especially for life-threatening illnesses.

But infertility is not a life-threatening condition.

Until this Government is prepared to order its affairs in such a way that British citizens, regardless of their postcode, can enjoy the full benefit of a health service to which they have contributed, anyone else must be right at the back of the queue, not pushed up to the front.

At the risk of being labelled xenophobic, I firmly believe that charity begins at home. It is unacceptable that successive governments should swagger around handing out money to whichever fashionable cause takes their fancy.