Tinderbox

Could things get any worse in Broken Britain? Hard to believe they could given the state of disarray we are in. Much of the public sector is, justifiably in my view, engaged in industrial action after 12 years of pay cuts, millions are using food banks, NHS waiting lists are longer than ever – this is surely as bad as it gets, right? Sadly, I fear, not.

We’re on our third prime minister of the year, the current one, Brand Rishi Sunak, having been elected by literally no one, other than Tory MPs, and this one is clearly no improvement. Imagine being no improvement on Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, but that’s what Sunak has managed to be. A prime minister who uses a visit to a homeless shelter for a PR stunt and then asks a homeless man whether he works in finance, before asking him what he’s doing over the weekend. Don’t make excuses for Sunak: I’ve spent a lifetime working for the DWP and a number of charities, as well as more recently in a food bank and, without trying to sound immodest, I know how to talk to people who have nothing. Sunak, along with his wife, are worth circa £730 million, and while it is entirely possible that they could know how ordinary people live their lives, it’s blindingly obvious Sunak doesn’t.

In this weird period between Christmas and the New Year, where it’s hard to work out what day it is, real life has been put in limbo. The lives of the have nots can be safely be tucked away at the back of the minds of the haves, at least until next week.

When I refer to Britain as Broken Britain, I mean it. David Cameron lied his way into power by lying that Britain was broken before the 2010 general election, just after the worldwide financial crisis, when there were few food banks and literally no hospital waiting lists. The banks, not the Labour government, had crashed the economy, but the people wanted change and boy they got it.

Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak have ripped the heart out of this country. Even without the catastrophe of Brexit – and no one seriously believes that wasn’t a terrible mistake – the state we are in is there to see for anyone who doesn’t wear blinkers. Many people curse price rises, as well as rising interest rates, and set the heating slightly lower than we did before, but for millions, well they have no choice. A choice between heating and eating? People I see every week don’t even have that choice. How about putting the heating on briefly in the morning for children who then go to a school breakfast club, if their school provides one, while their parents go hungry and cold? How about leaving a full-time job to go to a food bank, get some food to eat and then go back to full-time work for a few more hours? I saw these people last week and the week before, embarrassed, humiliated and permanently tearful.

In other jobs, I visited people living in unimaginable squalor. That was a few years ago. People I talk to today, who work with the poorest people, say it’s widespread. And these are the people described by the Mail and Suella Braverman as “benefit scroungers”, suggesting that they are all living the good life, subsidised by you and I. Sure, there are some people who know how to manipulate the system, but by and large they are the fraudsters. It is very hard to live a decent standard of life on state benefits. I’d say it’s impossible, but then, what do I know? I only spent something like 47 years of my life in that type of work. I’m not an expert at many things but I know what poverty looks like and I can say now that things are worse today, much worse, than they have ever been in my lifetime.

I do not see Rishi Sunak surviving as prime minister. His expensive PR team can do their best but the fact is that you cannot polish a turd. His vast wealth will always matter if he continues to inflict deeper poverty on the poor. It is not that it would be impossible for Sunak to show empathy with poor people, but there is no evidence whatsoever that he possesses any. His smug smile, the way he lapses into a form of ‘mockney’, dropping the odd h and t when he speaks and his clunky, tin-eared manner shows him not to be a man of the people. He cannot help that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and married into wealth, but if he then cannot relate to the struggles of others, then what is the point of him? Unless he somehow manages to convince that he has some answers to our problems, I foresee a short reign for him as PM.

The Conservatives are worn out after 12 long years in power. The parliamentary party is a divided mess of crackpots and halfwits and they are, as Sunak has found, unmanageable. He does not lead, he follows. I fear that by the summer, a familiar face will be back in Number 10: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Not because he is any good but because his party see him as electoral gold dust and, as in 2019, their saviour. Johnson hasn’t hung around in parliament to be a loyal backbencher: he still sees himself as prime minister.

None of them will unite our country because the unity is not how they work. They need an enemy, or maybe enemies. A combination of trade union ‘barons’, benefit scroungers, the imaginary ‘woke’ brigade, ‘do gooders’ (imagine hating those who do good, but that’s Tories for you), foreigners, especially non-white foreigners, lone parents – basically anyone who doesn’t look like them.

I see this country as a tinderbox waiting for a spark. In 1981, several cities experienced riots from mainly black youth. To many, the riots came unexpectedly, from left field, but to those of us on the frontline we were not surprised at all. Today, I see desperate people, who cannot eat and cannot heat their homes. Of course, I cannot predict with any certainty whether people will rise-up and take the law into their own hands but Sunak’s do-nothing style of leadership doesn’t fill me with confidence that things will carry on as they are. If someone has nothing, they have nothing to lose. And if you have nothing to lose – well, you can guess the rest.

Really, we need a woman or a man with a plan. Sunak clearly doesn’t have any kind of plan at all, beyond being prime minister. In a country that is steadily falling apart, that’s simply not enough. Power without responsibility, basically, and history shows where that leads.