I warn you not to be poor. I warn you not to strive. I warn you not to be doing OK, considering.
I warn you not to be homeless. I warn you not to have a mortgage. I warn you not to have fewer than, ooh, about three houses would do it.
I warn you not to be young, or old, or cold. I warn you not to drive. I warn you not to own a diesel car, a petrol car, or an electric car.
I warn you not to work, not to stop work, not to retire, not to go part-time. I warn you not to say the word ‘Brexit’.
I warn you not to protest.
I warn you not to strike.
I warn you not to seek refuge, or cross the sea, or save up stamps, or have children who grow, or parents who age, or pets, or hopes, or dreams.
I warn you not to really fancy a proper McVitie’s HobNob rather than whatever was scraped off the floor of a dog biscuit factory, smushed together and sold by someone pretending it was nearly a HobNob, and which you bought because branded products are a luxury now, and the HobNobs are now only for those who hob-nob with millionaires.
I warn you not to not have enough money to cope with prices that will rise every month for the foreseeable future. I warn you not to buy, sell, own, or inherit anything, unless you have millions of it already.
I warn you not to have dividends, own a small business, serve your local community, or be self-employed. I warn you not to get cross when the council starts charging you £2,000 a year to empty the bins once a month, because it needs to pay for social care that the government won’t do, and there’s no other way it can raise the money.
I warn you not to have accidents. I warn you not to go to hospital. I warn you not to get better, because you’ll still be in hospital, and then this will be ALL YOUR FAULT, not those who’ve been punishing us with whackjob ideology for 12 years.
I warn you that it will be a long, hard road ahead, and if you’re not up to a long march on a trail of tears then frankly that’s tough, because you’re already on it.
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PA)
When Jeremy Hunt stood up yesterday to deliver his Autumn Statement, he tore down everything the rest of us rely on.
The few upsides won’t kick in until April – if you’re spared – and the downsides start immediately, with worse in the years to come.
They say that this is necessary to balance the books, and to repay borrowing. But Liz Truss wiped her arse on the books, and the borrowing is only theoretical. In reality, the government told the Bank of England to provide more money, so it did.
Fleet Street Fox
If we were ever asked to repay it – which we aren’t – we could just ask the BoE to print more money to pay the debt. There is no real need for your local library to become the only warm place in town, for the potholes to go unfilled, for nurses to have a real-terms pay cut. Hunt has just decided those things should happen.
And while he and Rishi Sunak can say they understand how hard this all is, and their own personal costs may also increase, both men have many millions of pounds sitting between them and the sort of hardship which has to notice that a bag of dried pasta and a tin of beans just soaked up the HobNob money.
In good times, the fact that 1% of the British population is a millionaire doesn’t matter to anyone but the poorest. In hard times, it is more widely noticeable that the 1% is in Parliament, and we are in the s***.
Out of every pandemic comes massive social change, and out of every recession comes collective action. This mini-Budget appeased the City, but it will harden the bellies of everyone else. When winter bites, those who did not have to do what they will not feel will suffer for it. It feels like a General Strike is on its way.