What belongs to you, and to which do you belong? How do you understand the one’s matters? More pertinently: how do you sense them? Where do you pass that is a shared area with others, which belongs to all and sundry and but none folks for my part in a few vague ways? A car park, a library, a swimming pool, a network center? Do you feel comfy there? Now that such a lot of town centers consist of little, however, boarded up stores and bookies, where do you grasp free if you are younger, vintage, scared, or lonely?
What happens when the places that belong to you are taken away? I ask because this has already come about. With the Huffington Post, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has fleshed out this loss with cold, hard figures. Since 2014/15, extra than 12,000 public spaces were sold, and £9.1bn has been raised through neighborhood councils promoting property. As boards have had their investment slashed by vital authorities,
they have sold off everything they can to maintain simple offerings. But, unbelievably, many councils have used the cash raised from promoting their assets to make redundancy bills to the people they’re casting off. Yes, that’s right – all this somehow made economic sense to George Osborne, the wrecking ball who now has a component-time task as editor of the London Evening Standard.
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This policy is usually called “austerity,” I hate that phrase because it’s miles a con, seeming impartial instead of representing deliberate, everyday brutality. We have lived through this period, yet we discover one of its consequences, Brexit (another stupid made-up word), now quite mad in place of logic. The regulations the Tories pursued beneath David Cameron did now not even make sense in phrases of their inner common sense. The poorest have been to repay the imaginary deficit, which becomes redefined as somehow their obligation.
The result is that nowhere belonged to them anymore. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Go to any deprived region, and that is what humans will inform you, and you could rattle on approximately some superb art gallery in some splendid metropolis being free, and it was sodding all. Shared areas and civic areas make humans stakeholders of their network. That has been slipping far from us for years.
You may also be fortunate sufficient now not to word it. You drove past the new boxy flats being constructed in former council homes. You hadn’t been to the library in years because … properly, due to Google and the fact that we all have to tighten our belts. And now the magic cash tree is in bloom again, with Theresa May supplying distinctive bribes – small change – to go away-balloting cities in the north and the Midlands. However, this cynical past notion takes the money and runs because Christ knows it is needed.
Brexit has busted several myths: whether or not we love it or no longer, a few kinds of reckoning. One is that humans vote best out of economic self-interest. The accusatory narrative of remainers is like shouting at a person who is self-harming, “Do you take into account that this is bad?” while, of direction, they bloody well do. All the talk about standing alone and now not desiring anybody else is protective, certain. However, it’s miles a understandable response to feeling attacked and deserted.
One abstract noun (austerity) no longer motivated every other summary noun (Brexit). However, it allows us to subsequently give up the myth that everything just went mad, out of nowhere, in 2016. The damage, the deliberate damage, the destruction of the general public sphere and the public area had, for years, been going a great deal similarly to something Thatcher dreamed of. Cameron and Osborne carpet-bombed the social fabric of our state. May couldn’t make this extra abundantly clean in searching for patching up flesh wounds with pathetic bribes.
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