Ian Brady has complained of his treatment at Merseyside's Ashworth High Security Hospital

Moors murderer Ian Brady has complained of his treatment at Merseyside's Ashworth High Security Hospital, where he has been held since 1985. In a letter to his solicitor, Brady said his pay was a "prison transfer" £25 a week, compared with £100 a week for full-time patients. Brady, now 70, was convicted in 1966 of killing three children. He later confessed to killing two more. He has been on a hunger strike for a number of years and is being force-fed. He is keen to return to a conventional jail where his solicitor has claimed he would be free from the power of psychiatrists to prevent him from starving himself to death. A panel of legal and medical experts sitting on the Mental Health Review Tribunal are currently considering Brady's application to move to a normal jail. Brady claims he has been mistreated in Ashworth. Some of his grievances include not being treated for cataracts, which he has suffered for 10 years, being denied social visits since 1998 and being confined to his ward for 23 years. "I - a 70-year-old tube-fed skeleton - am the sole high-profile prisoner Ashworth holds to exploit as a demonising agent," he said. In a wider attack on the government, Brady accused the Labour Party of undermining civil liberties by playing on people's security fears. He said: "New Labour exploits the threat of a few fertiliser bombs to panic and herd a bovine generation. "As a child, I watched German planes daily/nightly bomb Glasgow back to full employment; New Labour has accomplished more permanent diminution of human/civil liberties than WWII bombs and rockets ever achieved." Brady was jailed for life with his former lover Myra Hindley. The pair became known as the Moors murderers because the bodies had been buried on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester.