Say what you’re for

Time for Labour to break silence on immigration

I WAS reading Psychology Today, not my magazine of choice, while waiting in the barber’s the other day.

He used to have old copies of GQ or Esquire or a Beano or two but I think he’s been on some sort of course.

He’s started wearing those half-moon glasses and a black polo neck jumper.

Even his questions have changed. “Got any plans for the weekend?” has become “What’s your earliest childhood memory?” or “Tell me about your relationship with your father.”

But anyway. Psychology Today published a study linking pessimism to a shorter life.

This is not good news, particularly at the moment. If it is right, my life expectancy is about 25 minutes.

Creepy

Because it’s not been a good week. Immigration was back on the agenda, Covid is still here, and there was, of course, an A-levels fiasco.

For a long time I’ve wanted rid of all those creepy pictures the papers and TV do of students jumping in the air waving their results.

But I do prefer them to what we got instead: some kid clutching their results, trembling with fear, and staring into the abyss.

Nearly 40 per cent of the grades awarded on Thursday were lower than teachers’ predictions, plunging university places into doubt and causing great distress to young people.

To be fair to Mr Johnson it wasn’t all bad.

Only poor kids saw their dreams wiped out. The private school lot, who were always going to be fine anyway, were fine anyway. That’s the advantage of private school I suppose – built in life insurance.

It’s not like Mr Johnson didn’t see this coming. No one has taken any exams since the pandemic started so that should have been a clue.

Also, the same thing happened in Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon did a U-turn. It was in all the papers. Plenty of warnings. No action.

Speaking of which, we also had boats full of migrants in n the Channel.

The second saddest bit of that saddest of sights was the Labour Party response. Non-existent. They haven’t really had a sensible conversation about immigration for a long time.

I fear they might have calculated that weighing in on this issue is more trouble than it’s worth.

It’s the same for prison reform, the homeless, veterans and so on.

All important things, say the cynics in Labour, but they don’t win votes.

What they do, however, is show, what kind of civilisation we are working towards. Which is important.

Yougov pollin polling showed 73 per cent of Labour voters had sympathy for those desperate people trying to cross the Channel. And 73 per cent of Tory voters didn’t.

Sometimes you have to pick a side. Anyway. The barber reckons I am looking at this all wrong.

He harps on about cognitive dissonance, Jungian archetypes and “trying to apply basic Freudian psychodynamics to a set of behaviours dominated by rational choice theory”.

Also I have to change shampoo and stop towel drying my hair. Terrible for the follicles, apparently.