A long, very slow, very dark night of anxiety dreams to dovetail around along, very slow day, very bright, oddly, day of deep depression is not my ideal start to the week. That paper mache feeling in my exhausted brain needed something positive and good this morning. Instead, I turned onto BBC Radio Five Live turning into a license fee funded version of Talk Radio, brilliant presenters like Nicky Campbell and Rachel Burden, reduced to hosting an endless phone-in about Brexit. With the country in utter turmoil, does the BBC not realise that plenty of other stuff is going on in our country?
To be very clear, as Theresa May might say before being anything but very clear, I do understand the massive damage, humiliation and loss of power Brexit will visit upon this country. Any Brexit will see us not gain control of our country but lose more of it. David Cameron needs to be put in stocks at least once a day when and if we leave the EU and be pelted with the tons of rotten fruit that will accrue when everything starts to break down.
Do not the well-to-do realise that not everyone is well-to-do? Do they not realise that hospital waiting lists are causing terrible problems for many people, the care crisis is, in certain areas of the country, catastrophic, parents are buying basic equipment for their children who are at school, a million people are using food banks, knife crime is at record levels and I am unwell. (I thought I’d put the last bit in because this is my blog -I hope you like the new design – and if I can wallow in a pool of self-pity on my own blog, then where else can I wallow in a pool of self-pity?)
I do get that it must be very difficult for media professionals to understand what life is like in the arse end of our country today. It’s hard enough for well-paid politicians, especially those who are already multimillionaires and have lucrative additional employment. When they are wondering which ski resort to use for their annual winter holiday, others are literally having to decide whether to eat or instead heat their properties.
Have Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn, two middle class, privileged politicians, any idea what is like to live in a cold, damp, poorly heated flat where the objective is to get through the day and go to bed again? This, I know for an absolute fact, is how a lot of people live their lives. It is life, but not as many of us know it.
And on the radio, pampered millionaires argue endlessly about Brexit, unable, or rather unwilling, to compromise, uninterested in talking about anything else. In the meantime, someone with mental health problems is committing suicide, another person is suffering in pain as they wait for a much needed operation, a mother is foregoing her dinner in order to ensure her children eat. This is not supposed to be some tin pot third world country. We are supposed to be the fifth largest economy in the world. It doesn’t feel like that for everyone because the wealth of the few is ‘earned’ off the backs of those with little or nothing.
Here, writ large, is the absence of effective leadership and effective, responsible journalism. Whilst the English nationalist, small state, low tax Sir Bufton Tufton (Con) explains why Britain badly needs to set itself on fire to ensure he can make a financial killing with a hard Brexit, he has either forgotten about the lower orders, as he probably sees them, or he never cared in the first place. Let them eat not cake, but rats. Everyman for himself.
This Brexit malarkey will make the poorest even poorer. Even the government breezily admits this. The millionaire journalists and politicians will carry on as before, lecturing us on how to live our lives and telling us what’s good for us, all but urging us to send our children up chimneys or preferably not have children at all unless we are as wealthy as them. And certainly don’t have a mobile phone or television.
This grim spring day accurately adds to my mood this morning and it sums up, quite perfectly, Britain today. Situation hopeless. That’s not just how I feel. It’s Britain today. And those who wield the power to influence, inform and change don’t give a damn.
