… and the idea we’ll keep returning to the way things were is dangerously delusional.
Anyone who has not sunk themselves into protective oblivion
from the truth that the lunatics took over the asylum some time ago, will have
given up waiting for ‘normal’ to return after the COVID pandemic.
Covid fall-out is just one element in what is wrong
with us; what is wrong with the world.
From the endemic casual use of regular non-prescription
drugs (and some prescription drugs) to the increase in problem drinking to
careless all day gambling – those seeking ways of by-passing reality are just one large collective symptom.
And yet – try as people might – it doesn’t work.
You’ll notice it when you’re out on the street. Fear fuelled anger and short
tempers due to the uncertainty that even those not paying attention can sense.
Last week the Bank of England decided to raise
interest rates. Those already struggling with the combined effects of broken
crumbling privatised infrastructure here in the UK coupled with the more recent
appalling self-harm of Brexit will be staring into the financial abys
especially as government help for huge fuel bills ends just as this new horror
bites.
Ordinary folk have seen their mortgages increase by
hundreds of pounds while they strike to desperately force a rise in wages.
Some have spoken about similarities to the 2008
crisis. Well – maybe.
I don’t see it.
In 2008 there was an expectation, born out to some
extent that we would ‘bounce back’ as we had before. There was a sense
that we had a god given right to spring back to the comfortable ground where we
could have it all, shop, ignore the environmental catastrophes happening ‘somewhere
else’ and like new knicker-elastic our world would hold up, keeping everything
in place and decent.
This time I think not.
Add into the mix that globally little has been done
of any significance to mitigate the destabilising effects of exponentially growing climate and pollution
crises. The notion that you can just batten down the hatches –
metaphorically or in reality – is utter fantasy.
At the start of the pandemic I whistled into the
wind about the numbers dying from pollution every single year and asked why
that was never as shocking.
But as many struggle to stay afloat financially,
mentally and emotionally what did our government serve up last week –
the spectacle of Boris Johnson getting another opportunity to clown about and
lie at public expense before the cameras.
You could be forgiven for thinking there were no
real problems for real people. Especially as that was followed a few days later
with a sting by the group ‘Led by Donkeys’ netting several failed Tory MPs
offering their wisdom to an unknown (and fake) Korean business for many
thousands of pounds. Delusion clearly has no limits.
Rishi Sunak we learnt the day of Johnsons select
committee hearing, benefitted through a tax break to the tune of £300,000 due
to a rule he voted for in 2016.
But while the rich and powerful are looking after
and focusing on themselves and as the media desperately screams at us to pay
attention to the latest royal soap opera and the ridiculous coronation – Britain’s
knickers are sagging. We are going to be caught with our pants around our
ankles fairly soon. There is no reclaiming our dignity – there is no going back
to the way things were.
At the weekend, the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibilities) stated that the economic harm of Brexit would equal covid. But even as the Tories try to blame everything on the war in Ukraine and the truth battles for space in between competing narratives, one thing is clear – people are struggling.
A country that had the chance to have all things a
civilised nation needed to call itself that, has squandered much of the post
WWII legacy. Its position in the world is vastly weakened. Some (me) would
argue Britain’s credibility and its essential core never recovered its balance
after the illegal invasion of Iraq.
My sense is - and you must make of that what you
will, I am not an economist –the world itself is tired and drooping. This world
in which we have that diminished, battered, belittled position will not bounce
back and neither will the UK.
I do not believe the knickers will pull up one more
time and stay.
We have worn everything out.
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