Well, we know Labour’s 1997 assertion that things can only get better wasn’t all it seemed, but this government has surely gone too far the other way –they tell us only that things can only get worse, & worse …
Forever?
Cuts are one thing while we pay off the debt & rein back the growth in public expenditure. We have stopped spending as if there will be no tomorrow.
All of a sudden it seems as if there really might not be one – or one that has only misery or worse to offer.
Will there be any pension at all? Will I even have a job to keep me in the meantime? What would really be best for the children – a degree & a debt, or a job in the university of life? Who will look after me when I am no longer able to do it for myself - perhaps that’s another reason for keeping the children close to home rather than sending them up & off.
The government will really have to play this one more carefully – especially with women. This is not an old fashioned strike led by union dinosaurs; those teachers, care assistants are the hard working mums we all know.
Shops are closing because we are being more economical – bringing yet more worry to other mums who (used to) work there. It’s awful, but what else can I do?
Gordon Brown lost ‘that woman’. Mrs Thatcher won in 1979 in part at least because she offered a vision of a better future to women of the working & middle classes. This government, especially the Conservative part of it, will lose to all ‘those women’ if it carries on unable to find the right tone.
Francis Maude will not win any sympathy by complaining that some union leaders are earning more than he is getting paid in his current job. And Big Society just seems more & more like a way to get women back to doing for free all those caring jobs that they have begun to be paid for.
Mrs Thatcher won against the miners in the 1980s, despite widespread sympathy for their case, because people thought that Scargill’s tactics were just plain wrong &, above all, because the electricity stayed on, in stark contrast to what had happened during the 3 day week of 1974.
So far all I have noticed is a library overrun with teenagers let off the leash on a Thursday afternoon, but if it gets much worse …
