Be informed

My home team, Hull City, have twice competed in the English Premier League, and twice through incompetence been relegated. The team is now working hard to get relegated to the third league. Conceding a 93rd minute goal against a relegation challenger on Saturday sums it up.

As Douglas Adams might have said, “but that’s as nothing compared to Brexit” (he actually likened the dimensions of space with a walk down the road to the chemist/pharmacy). Talking of which, if the incompetence of the government and the paralysis of the UK Parliament persists, there will be no point in walking to the pharmacy because there will be no drugs. Or the supermarket, for that matter, as there will not be any food. It is coming a bit of a cliche on Twitter to say things like, “I cannot believe I am saying this in 2018” in the context of food and drug shortages.

But of course, we are.

Not in my lifetime have I experienced the British political system so dysfunctional. I was well aware – if not of voting age – when the IMF bailed out the UK economy in the 1970s. I remember the limited excitement of the 3-Day week and power cuts. We had a gas fire with an electrical timer without which the fire would not work. How nuts was that? I lived through Thatcher, the miners’ strike. I was there with the million others trying to prevent war in Iraq. But I never felt that the polity was in crisis, only that I was on the wrong side. This time is different.