Five months after the general election, many – including Rosy Bremer – are still reeling from the result.
Ever since the election, it’s as if the country is going through the aftermath of a bad teenage party that’s made a total mess of the house. The NHS, which got broken at the last election binge, isn’t going to get fixed now, someone’s puked “hard working families” rhetoric all over the carpet and all the sticky bits won’t come out of the shag pile.
The concept of the deserving and the undeserving poor has pulled big time, leaving me as something of a class geek with my heart aching and eternally wondering ‘What on earth does she/he see in him/her?’ Who really wants to be told that if they fall off the post-industrial treadmill no-one’s gonna help them unless they get on their feet and help themselves? The post-industrial treadmill itself is looking distinctively ropey, like a ride at Alton Towers but no one’s called the engineer. Someone, I believe, has engaged a PR firm to represent the treadmill in its best light and take close-up photos of its sexiest cog.
Oh it all went horribly wrong and it wasn’t meant to be this way; the Tories weren’t meant to win and no-one was meant to get an overall majority but somehow it all got out of hand.
Someone’s now got to do the tidying up, the washing and the cleaning for the next five years, and I think I know who’s going to get stuck with that job. In Portsmouth, as all over the UK, it’ll be the women pulling out all the stops to keep families and communities together; they’ll be the ones fighting when their adult offspring get sanctioned for putting a comma in the wrong place on their JSA claims, they’ll be the ones petitioning to get services reinstated that have fallen to the Grim Reaper of Austerity, they’ll be the ones taking on three badly-paid part-time jobs to put food on the table and we will be the ones who kick the Tories out in five years’ time.
