It gives me no pleasure to say this, but things are not
looking good for the UK. The UK is staring down the abyss.
The emotional wellbeing of the country is in peril. Everyone
is angry and frightened.
The poor are angry because they are poor. They think it is
utterly unfair and diabolical that others are rich when they are poor. They are
infuriated that the government and councils have capped their benefits; they
are expected to demonstrate that they are trying to find work if they want the
benefits to continue, which is clearly an outrage. It is diabolical that they
can’t go on producing children and raise them at tax-payers’ expense. The government
will not give them child benefits from third child onwards, on the questionable
premise that they have already brought into this world two children whom they
can’t afford to raise.
The disabled people are distraught because the government
has unreasonably decided that it will not take their word that they are
disabled and will not continue dishing out allowances. They are forced to—shock!
Horror!—undergo assessments by doctors to determine how disabling the low back
pain or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is. It is humiliating and unnecessary. The
prime minister Theresa May was confronted during the election campaign by a
woman with learning difficulties, who shouted at May that she wanted (in no
particular order of importance) Disability Living Allowance (DLA), carer, cosmetic
surgery, face-lift, a paid-trip to Bali, and a flat in Kensington (why not?).
This is a clear-cut case of discrimination. You may be so intellectually
challenged that a hedgehog could beat you in chess in three moves (if a
hedgehog could move pieces), but that does not mean that you don’t have
feelings. Or desires. Or needs. Or demands. And who is going to meet them, if
not the government? It is distressing to
know that intellectually challenged woman is not alone in her suffering.
Apparently hundreds of people are having their Motability cars removed every
week, and are forced to hop to their local pubs.
The middle classes are losing the will to live because it
has not rained enough this summer (what is going to happen to their gardens?) The
GP surgeries are full to the brim with middle aged-women demanding Xanax
because they are having nightmares that Waitrose has run out of Jerusalem
artichokes. The middle classes are also upset that the government has completely
removed their child benefits on the spurious grounds that they are affluent and,
if they have enough money to send their children to private schools, they could
probably do without child benefits.
And Boris Johnson can’t make up his mind whether he should
be concerned that the price of a bottle of Chateau Lafite has shot up by
several hundred pounds, and, when he takes his (legitimate) children on skiing
holidays to Swiss Alps, he can’t help but notice that the price of Magnum
ice-cream bar is creeping up.
The public sector workers—the nurses, the fire-fighters, the
teachers—are demanding that the 1% cap on their pay-increments should be
lifted. Experts and Think Tanks are producing statistics, complex enough to
give Stephen Hawking a headache, to prove that despite the pay rise
year-in-year-out given to the Public Sector workers (barring a two year period
of freeze) in the last eight years, ‘if you take into account the inflation’,
their actual monthly pay ‘in real terms’ is slightly less than the yearly
salary of the barber of Henry VIII. Nurses can’t manage on their salaries and
are leaving NHS by the droves to open toddlers centres; and those who are
bravely continuing in their quest to help the ill, are having to supplement
their meagre income by moonlighting as strippers in Devil’s Advocate, so that
they can take a well-deserved break to Ibiza. If this is not cruelty, I ask you
what is.
The hospitals can’t cope with the demands of the population,
and are discharging people as soon as they regain consciousness after a road
traffic accident, and move the fingers of their hands by a couple of inches.
Everything is rationed, and the doctors are unhappy that they are not allowed to prescribe
drugs (with prices that make them unaffordable unless you sell your children
and pimp your wife) even though a trial carried in the Australian outback
concluded that the drug might be effective for a condition (that is rarer than
a democracy in the Middle East) but the researchers are not sure and it could
all be a Placebo effect.
The discrimination in the NHS is rampant. Hospitals are
turning away people who like to eat a lot and have clogged up their
arteries, worn off their hip joints and vertebrae and in general ruined their
health, and therefore are desperately in need of stomach-banding, telling them
(heartlessly), instead, that they ought to take some responsibility of their
life-style and turn away from years of gluttony. Does the NHS not realise the
efforts that go into cultivating bad habits? The hospitals are insisting that
smokers must stop smoking without which they will not receive free heart
bypass. It is clearly unfair, and, for that reason, unacceptable. As John
Prescott, that intellectual giant in the Blair government, once remarked with
great compassion, smoking and eating greasy burgers (because the poor people
can’t be expected to cook healthy meals at home with boiled cabbages and spinach) are the only
recreational activities left for the poor, and how dare the government deprive
them of it? Some bigots and misogynists are suggesting that breast enhancement surgery
should not be offered free on the NHS. It is only a matter of time before the
NHS says that you should scoop out your own appendix at home with garden shears instead of coming to the hospital.
The mental health services are overwhelmed. They can’t cope
with the demand, and have absolutely no clue what they can do to help people
who will not go out of their houses because they have no friends, no skills, no
talent, no purpose in life, and who believe that they are ugly and stupid and
unattractive and not fit for human company, and who clearly need someone to do
their shopping, pay their bills, come to their flat every day to check whether
they have taken shower, and run their lives for them. Their families won’t do
this. It is clearly the government and social services’ responsibility. These
inadequates, I am sorry to say, are horribly let down by the cuts to mental
health services.
And let’s not forget the suffering of drug addicts. These
poor, vulnerable individuals, who, through no faults of their own (I don’t know
whose fault it is, but I am inclined to blame either Tony Blair or the Tories;
it’s a safe bet, when in doubt blame them), are reduced to burgling old
grannies and selling crack to school children, are being deprived of their
daily methadone fix. Very unreasonable demands are being made of them, such as
they should stop taking drugs if they want the prescribed drugs to continue. It
is patronising to be told that sitting on your backside and watching the Jeremy
Kyle show is not ‘recovery’. The government simply does not realise (because
the Tories don’t care) that the unbearable ennui of existence and lack of
any skills can only be relieved by class A drugs. And day-time television shows
where stupid people talk about the unbelievably stupid things they have done
serve the very useful purpose of improving the self-esteem of stupid people
watching the programmes, who are buoyed up by the hope that they too can
become television stars because they too don’t have any talent.
The students are upset because the government will not make
their university education free, so that, by the time they complete a
three-year degree course in flower-arrangement or Ceramics at the University of
Garboldisham (which used to be a village school before New Labour decided it
was University), they have debts bigger than the combined national
debts of Greece, Portugal and Spain. The students are upset that they would be
paying student-loans until they die, and refuse to be assured by the assurance
that they will in effect not pay a penny of the student-loan, because no one is
required to start repaying the loan until they start earning a decent income,
which they are never going to be able to earn, because, once they get their degree
in dog-grooming, no one in his right mind is going to employ them. Is it any
wonder that young people in Britain have the poorest mental wellbeing in
the world, according to a report in the Independent?
(Yes, you read it correctly, the emotional wellbeing of the young people in
Britain is worse than the emotional wellbeing of young people in Taliban
controlled Afghanistan, where it is a cause for celebration if you have all
your limbs intact when the day ends.)
Britain is becoming a nation of Philistines. In Norfolk, incensed
middle-aged ladies with salt-and-pepper hair and crew cuts reminiscent of inmates
of mental asylums, jug-eared men with suspicious stains on their trousers, and
other ne’er-do-wells with faces that look like they have been stepped on, are
jumping up and down, waving placards, and making a racket louder than a lobster
boiled alive, about the closure of local libraries, and not prepared to listen when
you tell them that they can get all their Jilly Coopers in the Oxfam shops for
50 p, and closing the libraries with carpets that look like they have been
left rotting for hundred years is probably a good thing.
And, if all of the above was not enough to make you feel
wanting to drink rat poison or relocate to Luton, Bradly Lowery has died. I
have no idea who Bradly Lowery is (or was) other than that he was one of the many
thousands of young children who die of cancer every day. Young Bradley was a fan of Sunderland
football club. Don’t ask me anything about Sunderland football club, or Sunderland,
for that matter. Sunderland, I have heard, is a piss-poor town in the North
where the natives speak in a patois which has superficial resemblance
to English, but, still, is not easy to understand. As for Sunderland Football club, it may
or may not have managed to stay in the Premiership Football (I don’t know and I
don’t care). Nevertheless, the death Bradly Lowery has made the front page news
on the BBC website, and we are all devastated. I read in the BBC news that
Bradly, the Sunderland fan, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma when he was 18
months old. (Was Bradly a Sunderland fan before the brain tumour was diagnosed,
or did he become a Sunderland fan after the diagnosis? In which case could his
choice be explained as a symptom of the tumour?)
Oh! Lest I forget, we are all going to become very poor because of Brexit. That
is a given. It is not going to end well, no matter what positive spin the
Brexiteers try to put on it. To give a sophisticated literary analogy, if you set out to
write an essay about two donkeys fucking, and if you write an essay about two
donkeys fucking, then you have written an essay about two donkeys fucking; and
you will have trouble convincing people that the essay is in fact about
daffodils. The trade secretary Dr Liam Fox, who has the charm of a camel with gingivitis
(and temperament to match), is trying his best—bless him!—and going round the
globe grovelling to the dictator in Philippines one day, schmoozing up to oily
businessmen shiny suits in New Delhi the next (much preferable to dealing with our European neighbours), to attract trade, but it is not
working. The Chancellor Philip Hammond keeps on hammering the point that Labour’s
sums in the election manifesto don’t add up and people should not trust Labour
with the economy, which suggests that the Chancellor is experiencing worrying
lapses of memory: the election is over; the British public has not trusted
Labour with the economy; and, he in fact, has the responsibility to come up
with plans for the economy. Which he doesn’t have. Finally, we have David
Davies, the man we have put our trust in to negotiate Brexit with the EU. Given
his performance so far, we might as well have put that chap Boycie from Only Fools and Horses in charge of the
Brexit negotiations. David Davies keeps on repeating that Britain will come out of the
single market and customs union, and everything will carry on as before; we
will somehow wing it (looking very smug and happy with himself, like a man,
who, after a life-time of search, has found the location of clitoris; but just
because you know where it is does not mean you know what to do with it). And
in the BBC Question time old folks with hardly any teeth in their mouths are
shouting let’s get the hell out of the EU and bring back the Empire.
The country is divided. The gap between the rich and the
poor is increasing. The poor are no longer prepared to stay poor. They want a
slice of the goodies the rich are enjoying and become rich themselves. This is
the kind of environment that is ripe for revolution. And that is exactly what
Jeremy Corbyn is plotting with his mates McDonnell and Diane Abbott (so success is assured, then). There will
be a revolution, Jezza is confident, that will sweep him into number ten, so
that he can spread the good work, started in Cuba by the dictator Fidel Castro,
throughout the UK. Never mind that we as a nation are incapable of storming a train
without first forming a queue; and never mind that Corbyn is incapable of
deciding whether the toilet seat should be up or down without a five-hour meeting with a
committee, there will be a revolution. Jezz we can.
