PotCXXIpouri - another slight return

 Still catching up with what you all missed while my broadband wasn't working. I attended the Bradford Literature Festival's inevitable, and welcome, J.B. Priestley event, which this year addressed 'English Journey'. Commissioned by the prominent left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz this is an account of the great man's travels around England at the height of the depression. A precursor to, and an inspiration for, Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' it shares that book's unwillingness to look away from the effect of poverty on society and, in particular, on children. Not so, of course, the members of the governing party in the U.K. Against the background of a report showing that the cohort of children born during the period of austerity brought in by Cameron and Osborne are shorter both than their predecessors and than children of the equivalent age elsewhere in Europe, these two smug poshos turned up at the Covid enquiry to deny that the same austerity had anything to do with the country's unpreparedness for the pandemic. 

A more recent example of self inflicted economic and social damage has also been in the news concerning the seventh anniversary of the referendum on leaving the EU, a referendum that, by no coincidence, took place whilst the same two deadbeats were in charge. I gave my views here at the time - and indeed here at the time as well - and haven't changed them at all. Professor John Curtice (for the benefit of overseas readers let me point out that when it comes to psephology in the UK the Prof is 'the man') says that the reason the polls currently show a majority thinking that leaving the UK was a mistake isn't so much that people have changed their minds as that a significant number of those who voted Leave have subsequently died. Good.