The electorate’s strange sense of entitlement

How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately bleak times. A good dozen or so shared their experiences with the presenter Winifred Robinson – and all but one dutifully explained that they were about to embark on a nice holiday.

Further, of those going away for a bit, all but two were taking a holiday abroad – the Algarve, Benidorm, Catalonia were some of the places mentioned. One woman complaining of penury was taking at least two trips – the first to the Galapagos Islands and the other to Japan. The callers seemed a bit miffed that they’d had to ‘save up’ for their holidays, while the woman heading off to see the pink-footed boobies had received a bequest from her dead mum.

Listening to this stuff I thought, um, it’s hardly the bleedin’ Irish potato famine, is it? Or the Great Depression? I suppose you could argue that Radio 4’s listeners are pretty much exclusively middle-class and therefore I was not getting a representative sample of the very real suffering currently being occasioned. And yet the statistics show that more people are booking holidays abroad this year than was the case in 2019, before the pandemic. I do wonder a little if the constant yelling on the airwaves that we are irrevocably doomed economically, and that the poor are dying in their droves, might be slightly overstating the case.

My suspicion is that small businesses have been hit badly but that most people are getting by OK, even if the rise in mortgage interest rates might hurt a few.