by Jack Lesgrin
This is an age when we need to think the unthinkable, because we’re living at a time when the undoable is being done daily. Yet amazingly, the world does not stop spinning, because we adaptable humans, though reeling, continue to stumble onwards.
Just think about last week. Who predicted (answer: not the common man, not politicians and not academics), that there would be a global and British fuel and energy crisis? Or that government ministers would face the legitimate and unprovocative question “can you guarantee that the lights will stay on this winter?”.
Did any of us think there nearly wasn’t enough carbon dioxide for our entire meat processing industry, or enough gas to power manufacturing?
Did anybody predict that the Prime Minister would claim that unprecedented problems with the economy, such as a lack of abattoir workers, or lorry drivers, that are starting to render entire industries in danger of collapse, and national herds of animals at risk of fruitless slaughter, would be dismissed breezily as a necessary rebalancing of the economy after the great Brexit gamble?
My old favourite litmus test for modern political insanity, George Orwell, will surely be smiling or grimacing up there in heaven or its atheist equivalent, at a government whose leaders claimed that their chosen course in Brexit would lead to sunny uplands, dismissed those who warned in advance of economic problems as unpatriotic and fear-mongering, then manage, through a flick of the quill, to claim that the resulting economic calamities are actually a sign of improvement and a great benefit to the worst off.
What does this tell us about the nature of our lives in the year 2021, in the Restless Twenties? On the one level, governments make sure to guarantee the basics, hence we had furlough, and, thankfully, the welfare state protects us from the vicissitudes of the market.
