I saw a headline yesterday "Lack of gritter drivers will turn roads into icy death traps this winter." Yes, one more thing to feel depressed about. Presumably the gritter drivers have been lured away to drive lorries.
Everything is just about as lousy as expected. Shortages in the shops are predicted to get worse towards Christmas. Fuel bills rocketing up. Fruit and vegetables rotted in the fields with no-one to pick them. The price of food rising rapidly. The NHS struggling to cope and sliding into privatisation. The government refusing to accept that migrants earning less than £26,500 might have anything to offer. (Although the Migration Advisory Committee had said that at least 20 professions, including butchers, should be exempt.) The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
But what else did anyone expect, after Brexit and the election of a right wing Tory government? The young blame us for both disasters and think that anything that particularly affects the old is our own fault. I have tried to argue online that there are many oldies who voted against Brexit and the Tories, and that the so-called boomer generation wasn't always so reactionary. When we were young, we were maybe a more radical generation than today's youth. However, the young are unconvinced. They point at the graphs which show that the biggest age group to vote for Brexit and the Tories was the over-65s. It's not surprising that they blame Granny and Grandad for the mess we're in.
What I find bitterly funny is the claim, made by Leavers, that Remainers are gloating and rubbing their hands as "Project Fear" becomes real. None of us wanted to be proved right - if there are empty shelves and rising prices, we suffer too. Same applies to the Tory government. They're as callous and corrupt as I expected, but being able to say "I told you so" is very cold comfort.