The cost-of-living crisis isn’t about the cost of living at all. It’s about how we are governed, and boy are we badly governed, and it is about how we ourselves stick up for and enforce our rights.
The government of this country is falling apart, while people’s rights are being kicked into touch, just for the sake of expediency.
Just how bad it is, and will get, hasn’t registered with ministers, and certainly not with the PM.
Westminster and its tax payer salaried, expense account, subsidised restaurant and bar occupants really have no idea of what is happening on the ground. As always, policy is being made in a vacuum, with little understanding of how it impacts on real life, while issues of immediate and vital concern are not being addressed. Looming strikes, rampant inflation, massive public debt, higher taxes, failing public services, illegal immigration ad nauseum.
Visit any Citizens Advice and see just how many people, who earn less than they need to survive there are and talk to staff who have ‘never seen anything like this’. And consider this, that the CAB is about the only surviving face to face support service left, everything else is either a circular, going nowhere, online maze or at the end of an interminable ‘your call is important to us’ 60 plus minute phone call. Which all predicates on the assumption that those who need support have access to the internet and can afford the hour-long calls.
But you don’t need to visit CAB to do the arithmetic. We are, I am convinced, facing a financial crisis like no other in modern times. Having lived through the 70’s and like many others of my generation having experienced the ‘3-day week’, the power cuts and strikes, we could be forgiven for thinking the clock had turned back or am I going to wake up tomorrow with just a feeling of déjà vu?
It is not that we have not faced such crises in the past, but we live in different times. People are no longer as self-reliant and adaptable as they once were, and there is less resilience in the system. There are no longer the extended (or in many cases any) family to support the individual, while official support systems and charities are overloaded. We also have to carry a huge number of immigrants (many illegal) who tend to squeeze out other needy indigenous communities who have paid a working lifetime of taxes and NI for just such support.
In short, we are facing the perfect storm of a magnitude, the like of which hasn’t been fully (or at all) been recognised by those who govern and, for those same who govern who are not directly affected, it is as remote as a Mars landing.
AndyMac