There’s an old joke which goes: I do a lot of work for
charity – pause for effect – on a rollover week I buy two tickets. (Ba-doom
tish!) Like many people I buy a weekly lottery ticket by direct debit and
forget about it, but I labour under no illusion that one day I will wake up
wealthy... and yet. There is no harm in dreaming, but you can’t put all your
hopes into the remote possibility of a chance event; on a roll of the dice coming
up in your favour.
However, despite the obvious drawbacks of living life in
the expectant hope that the impossible will happen, millions of people the word
over do exactly that. Take Liberal Democrat leader, Tiny Tim ‘minor fart’
Farron; he believes that his cherished dream of a second EU membership referendum
has come true and that, on the 8th of June his party’s phoenix will
rise from the ashes to influence events on the world stage and brave, brave
Timothy Mitty will be lauded as the nation’s saviour.
Nicola Sturgeon inhabits a realm where she is allowed to perform
hypocrisy at such an expert level that she can, having used the Scottish
National Party as a vehicle to promote one single cause already rejected by the
Scottish voters, accuse Theresa May of acting in narrow party interests instead
of in the interests of the country. In Ms Spudgun’s fevered brain the agonised echoes
of cognitive dissonance must be muffled by the sheer amount of cotton wool stuffing
that keeps her cranium from collapsing.
Or, imagine living in Jeremy Corbyn’s head where the
mighty Labour sleeping dragon rises up to sear the flesh of rapacious Tories,
hell-bent on devouring every scrap of public money, stolen from the pockets of upturned
poor people. A world in which all you have to do is promise £10 a week extra
for carers and lo, it shall be so and thou shalt be raised on the shoulders of
the grateful populace and carried to a place of oratory where the masses wait,
eagerly, to hear how they will become, on average, £43 richer per year when kind
Sir Jeremy makes the rich people pay more tax.
But wait, rich people DO pay more tax. In fact they pay
ALL the tax and poor people not only pay zero tax, they get given extra ‘free’
money, taken from the rich, to pay the rent on their hovels and to breed their
filthy brats and cover the cost of locally provided services. But poor people
are often poorly informed people and they, too, live in a dream world where
Conservative politicians dine on baby’s brains scooped from their opened skulls
and use the poor as furniture while robbing the NHS to send their children to
private schools in offshore tax havens. (Diane Abbott told them this.)
You didn't see that coming, did you?!
Believe what you like, but on observation the vast majority
of people are no better or worse off than they were a year ago, ten years ago.
The vast majority of people don’t much care for deep political analysis of
events, preferring to believe the headlines of their partisan press ahead of
the evidence of their own experiences. And that same majority will vote the way
they generally vote, give or take a few swings. For what it’s worth, I think
Theresa May has been an exemplary PM in the few months she’s been in the job
and I believe she will be given a mandate to crack on with it. But what do I
know?
