There’s really not much to say lately. All the hard data is as depressing as ever. Looking at media headlines, the UK increasingly resembles the one we generally rather gratefully left behind decades ago, as we began to accrue the benefits of EU membership and a new sense of European identity.
The Daily Maul has delivered a tabloid quip… “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas General Strike.” Little wonder really with unions being asked to settle at best for 8% across two years when inflation is at 10% per annum, and the likely cost of living rise for the same period is going to add up to at least 20% with food inflation higher still. In real terms that’s at least a 12% pay cut, but likely more. Most folk simply can’t hope to afford that. Not surprisingly, they don’t see that as either fair or reasonable.
The diminutive, Richie Sunak (where is Spitting Image when you need it?), our fifth conservative, prime minister in succession, trying to impressively snarl up and across the very large dispatch box, looks terminally small and weak… an out of touch spoilt child of privilege, tilting at windmills. He points his little finger at an imaginary Labour Party of supposedly socialist lean and squeaks. It sounds forced, unconvincing and impotent. Who is he trying to kid. Not even many of those behind him are convinced.
Labour, of course, hasn’t actually delivered, in practice, a socialist policy in office that I can even recall. Keir Starmer is extremely careful to not alienate the centre or even the right lately, in his ho-hum policy statements, so trying to insist, as Sunak does, that they be regarded as a clutch of communist agitators fermenting trouble on the picket lines to stoke revolution, just makes Sunak look moribund, absurd and desperate. This mess may not entirely be of the Conservatives making, but at best they haven’t helped, and at worst have instigated, and the public, arguably not all the sharpest pencils in the box, nevertheless know it. We are at peak animal farm where the solid, hard working, animals rightly sense that they’ve been had… levelled down not up… and they’ve righteously decided that frankly they have had enough.
This is not the sunny uplands of Brexit they were promised by Farage, Gove, Johnson, Reece Mogg and the rest of the lying jackals who corralled them into this mess. It’s just more misery than it anyway was going to be. There never was a plan for Brexit Britain that ever had the smallest hope of surviving beyond exposure to reality.
For those of us who saw it all coming, even before the perfect storm of a global pandemic and Putin’s unnecessary war and energy crisis, this delivers no satisfaction. It’s more a sad sense of being victims of a deliberate fraud than schadenfreude. The outside temperature is currently below freezing. Bills are mounting. Luck is running out. Tick tock.