The state we are in, your future and mine. Echoing emptiness & uncertain tomorrow.

‘Thank you very much for working hard. For keeping the lights on, for running the buses, delivering the post, and cooking our food. For teaching our children, caring for our old, tending the sick, for maintaining the roads and building our houses. Thank you very much for manning the phones, selling our groceries, and stacking the shelves, for cleaning our windows, removing our waste, and recycling, for policing the streets and extinguishing your fires. For driving the trains, processing your applications, and fixing the radiators. For being around and your self-sacrifice when Covid struck (as we spent £££ on our friend’s useless PPE), when others were out partying, for tidying-up after that party and keeping the electricity-on. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

And now you have the cold.

You need to delay switching-on the heating, despite the October chill.

‘Don’t worry, you are saving the planet!’

No holiday this year. Postpone for another.

And then, for the poor. When you are struggling. We will make it worse. We will stick in the knife and twist.

We will make you homeless.

You will surf the sofas of friends or if your family is small, we will allocate you a bed in a hotel for 28 days before moving you on. We will help you look for unaffordable housing far from your family and friends, we will move you on or evict if the landlord demands.

We will charge you more for gas and electricity.

We will force you down a pathway of despair.

We will make you smoke or drink or eat too much or too little.

Hang you out to dry and leave you in the rain.

We will look at your children and acknowledge their physical, social, and mental health challenges and then turn away and let you get on with it.

When you seek help, we will create systems of such complexity that no one who enters can ever arrive or find their way out. We will make Kafka laugh.

It is the worst of times and the best of times if you are sitting on a million with a secure pension and paid-off mortgage. It is the worst of times if you are young and setting-out. We will inflate your rents and destabilise your pound.

Want to save? Pay of your debts first.

Want to study? Let us have your money. We will lend you some. Pay it back before you start living.

We will turn the screws and crush you.

We will generate a false sense of grandiosity when our monarch dies and leave you sitting in the gutter.

It is all good. If you are one of us.

Not so for you, but that is OK.

You have told us what you want time after time.

When the writing was on the wall, we read between the lines and did what was necessary.

You voted to leave, and we took you away.

You chose not to vote, and we took advantage of your time on Twitter or TikTok. We manipulated you as rats in a maze or hungry rabbits.

We played and continue to toy with your lives, your self-exposed innocence.

We set the rules and change the game if there is any sign of equality or shift towards a positive outcome that is not our own.

We will stop you complaining.

We won’t let you protest or demonstrate or stop the traffic.

You can blow your whistles and bang your drums so long as the noise doesn’t interfere with our going about our business.

We will use our money wisely and make a handsome return.

We will vulture invest and asset strip and enjoy our time in the sun or the snow. We need to see the glaciers before they are all gone. Don’t worry, you can always catch up on Netflix. You can spectate as we live our lives.

We can watch the planet burn or sink or drown, we will observe the levels of pollution the thickening of the air, the disappearance of habitat, of tillable earth, we will be OK.

We are moving to where the air is fine, and we will move again if necessary. We might consider Mars, when you have sorted-it out, when you have tested the air and the gravity and the system failures.

We will spend your money, for your money is ours and, you don’t really have any.

We will leach off your existence and grow mighty.

You will wither.

Hey. Christmas is coming.

Another distraction.

Don’t worry, it will soon be over.

#enoughisenough

Enjoy your week. Get a booster.