10 YEARS UNTIL CHANGE

IT will be five or possibly 10 years before the UK witnesses another change of Government and, in Lord Heseltine’s words, it will be 20 years and ‘a different generation’ before rejoining the EU becomes an issue.

The painful austerity of the past decade has most sharply affected low income families and less affluent areas, yet Johnson’s manifesto included nothing about the slashing of tax credits that has left many working parents thousands of pounds a year worse off, and has proved no obstacle to a Tory Party that has won an election thanks to the votes of the middle aged and the old, while becoming even more toxic to the majority of the young.

A referendum campaign, shabby in its concept and illegal in its prosecution, has been succeeded by a Tory election campaign that promised 40 ‘new’ hospitals, 20,000 ‘new’ police officers and 50,000 ‘new’ nurses.

In an age of information chaos, Dominic Cummings, the Svengali who has masterminded all of No 10’s output, has proved that you can ‘doctor’ videos, suppress information and avoid challenging interviews with impurity, and when Channel 4 and the BBC highlight these evasions, you can threaten to review their licences.

This Government’s huge majority means that any influence to shape events has gone.

The normal constraint, which can be exerted to temper the excesses of the elite, is the fear that the opposition will supplant the Government.

No such opposition how exists in England.

The election of a PM who is dissolute in his private life and dishonest and opportunist in his public life, yet whose conduct is laughed off in the mainstream media as the picturesque exploits of a ‘loveable rogue’, suggests that, as a nation, we have lost sight of what we are ‘for’.