Junior doctors demonstrate outside the department of health on 11 February. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

It is not always easy to do the right thing. In the 80s, for example, I remember when we all tried to avoid buying apartheid-era South African fruit. “Are these apples from South Africa?”, a photographer friend asked a cockney grocer, “because if they are I can’t buy them.” “I don’t blame you mate,” replied the cheery shopkeeper, “what if them Africans have touched them?” It would be an understatement to say they had been talking at cross purposes.

As an ethical consumer in today’s choice-crowded marketplace, I buy tax-avoiding Starbucks coffee only as a last resort, when no other chain coffee stores are available, perhaps at a motorway service station. But, like an anarchist Fagin, I have trained my children, aged two and four, to wait until the barista has turned round, and then knock as many of the chocolate coins off the front of the display as they can. These I then pocket while pretending to tie my lace, thus costing Starbucks more on each transaction than they make.

I have explained to the children that though this act is not legal, it is nonetheless moral, in a neat reversal of Starbucks’ historical tax avoidance, which though legal, was not moral. Teaching children to steal from Starbucks is a way of making ethics fun for kids and bringing philosophy alive. And they get to eat chocolate which, under normal circumstances, I would forbid them. It’s a win-win situation for all of us. Don’t you wish I was your dad?

Since privatisation, travelling on trains is also clearly morally wrong. How can it be right that privatised rail providers are still in receipt of public subsidies while paying shareholders dividends? But if I’m not on the train, I’m on the motorway, clogging up the environment with evil emissions from my doctored Volkswagen Passat, although this does at least mean I can visit service station Starbucks branches and steal their chocolate coins. Swings and roundabouts.

Due to their unethical milk-powder marketing strategies in the developing world, I have a blanket ban on Nestlé products, meaning when my four-year-old was offered Shreddies for breakfast after a sleepover, she told her friend’s perfectly pleasant parents that they were murdering babies. I worry I have been overzealous in my indoctrination and that when the kids enter their teenage rebellious years, they will turn into a pair of Jeremy Hunts.

But who would have thought the latest challenge to the ethical consumer would come from the NHS? On Monday, it was revealed that health service rules preventing NHS managers offering contracts to companies with Google-style tax arrangements are to be scrapped. If a company subcontracted to provide NHS care is technically legal then it is unfair, under the free market ethic of competition, to discriminate against them. Soon it won’t even be possible to die ethically, let alone buy breakfast cereal.

Clinical commissioning groups in Bristol and Hackney, where I live, are to suspend their objections to using care services provided by companies registered in tax havens. But I haven’t spent my whole life not eating Shreddies and stealing Starbucks chocolate only to be taken fatally ill and see public money paid to a care provider overseeing my expiry while not contributing any of its profits back into the public purse.

Twelve years ago, I collapsed backstage at the Soho theatre after a long-standing stomach disorder finally turned critical, vomiting and discharging blood from my bottom. Had I been obliged to make my own way to a hospital whose ethics I agreed with, I could have wriggled like a filth-trailing snail along Dean Street without any trouble. Indeed I have seen the wealthy night-revellers of Boris’s brave new London step gingerly over expiring homeless folk in worse states, so there would be little risk of a kindly Samaritan forcing me to seek succour from a politically inappropriate service provider.

I lined up black coffees in a Leeds hotel room and started this column on Thursday morning, having seen the story about the tax-avoiding care providers on Monday, and thought it might be funny to write a piece playing up to the image of myself as a leftwing zealot, someone who would rather die in the street like a sick dog than be nursed in a hospital by Virgin Care or GE Healthcare. Ha ha ha.

Then around lunchtime, while writing this sentence, I saw junior doctors on the internet complaining about Jeremy Hunt lying about their pay offer. My deadline was looming and suddenly the intricacies of NHS service providers’ tax arrangements seemed irrelevant compared to the problems facing its very survival. At 1pm Jeremy Hunt appeared on Sky news, saying he had the support of 20 NHS CEOs. But 20 minutes later Twitter showed four had already jumped ship. A news surge had put my funny column into freefall.

On my desktop I still had a website open where I was trying to see if there was a scientific word for the mixture of blood and excrement a sickly snail would leave behind, so I could use it as an over-the-top adjective in the bit about crawling along the road earlier. But the story had moved on. I had no column. I know this dispute isn’t all about me, but I wish people like Jeremy Hunt and these junior doctors would think about the hidden costs of their actions to freelance writers trying to file barely amusing copy on a deadline. How selfish!

The hours passed. Public anger boiled. I wondered why Hunt was imposing on junior doctors a non-negotiable contract which any sensible person could see will decimate the profession and ultimately make the NHS in England untenable. But perhaps, I started to wonder in my caffeinated paranoia, perhaps this was the idea all along.

I don’t want to sound like the Daily Telegraph’s idea of an out-of-his-depth alternative comedian columnist, citing barely understood quotes from books I have never read before going off to talk about farts and cocks on stage for two hours, but Noam Chomsky described the standard technique of privatisation thus: “Defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital”.

Suddenly, the removal of moral objections to NHS managers offering contracts to the world’s worst companies seems like part of a bigger picture. Those doctors will defect. And who can blame them? But the way will be cleared to plug the gap with privately supplied, unregulated, labour. And the free market fundamentalists will maintain that their hands were forced.