The Last Election, by Pete Davies

The Last Election, by Pete Davies (Vintage Contemporaries).
It is sometime in the near future, and Britain is becoming a third world nation under the Money Party. The rich are getting richer; the poor are getting bread and circuses: all-day snooker on the telly, slick advertising, music videos, free drugs and nights of unfettered frolic at the government-subsidized Dance Barns. In between are the compromised middle class, who do the work, reap their bleak reward and try to ignore their own hypocrisy.
Who is paying the bills? Well, a penny saved is a penny earned; so the Money Party is distributing a wonder drug that kills pain, brings happiness and, by way of unburdening the nation of its aged and infirm, gives death a helping hand.
An anti-Utopian nightmare of a novel that wears the grinning face on the poison bottle, it is the author's first. As a satirist, Davies has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer but also the forcible anger to keep pounding away.