Yesterday morning, instead of listening to The Archers Omnibus – the constitutional duty of everyone of ‘that’ generation – I was walking around my local roads and avenues, dropping election leaflets through letter boxes.
I wasn’t expecting to meet many people, and I didn’t. They were all listening to The Archers Omnibus no doubt.
But there were a few people about, dog walkers mainly, and a man, a couple of years younger than me – he said so – who was wanting to talk.
The conversation moved on from ‘This will be an interesting election’, through the ‘immigrants taking jobs, although I’m not against them as people’. I countered with the’ taking jobs that were not being filled by local talent, in a lot of cases because the pay was too low, but it was all fairly superficial stuff – nothing too deep for a Sunday morning.
He then mentioned that he was okay, but it was going to be tough for the young, and so I mentioned the ‘F’ word.
And he stopped walking, and said ‘You are right, it is about fairness’. He didn’t like Corbyn – didn’t bother to ask why. Didn’t trust Johnson as far as he could throw a truck – didn’t need to ask why. And hadn’t forgiven the Liberals for keeping the Tories in power.
Then he said ‘Thank you’. I asked what for, and he said ‘For making it simple’.
And that is all it’s about – fairness. As in – not having to rely on food banks even though you are working full time – not having to prove you are unable to work, when your disability makes that impossible – not have to subsidise your child’s school so they can provide the basics of education – not have to beg and struggle to get to see a GP when your medical record says ‘See this person now!’.
Because those that decide how much is done to provide the basics for everything we need, they do not worry about these things, because they don’t need to.
And so it comes down to fairness. Never mind the rest of the manifesto. Because those that put fairness as the first imperative will not be those that say ‘we’ and mean ‘you’, because they are okay no matter what.
We have had too long with them. They have had too much for too little.
It’s time for fairness.
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