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Just when did we cross the rubicon? At what point in modern history did the protection of commercial interests become the overarching priority, ahead of public safety and the national good? The news today that the data on deaths in care homes from Covid-19 are being kept secret to protect the interests of commercial enterprises [Guardian Online] should come as a profound shock to any decent, right-minded person; but I suspect that outside of our well-meaning bubble of left-leaning intellectualism and its support media it will go little-remarked and if at all it will be a with a fatalistic '...it is what it is...'

As a boomer, I was born into the Welfare State; that wholly non-commercial construct that sought rightly to give everyone equal access to care from birth to death, allowing no-one to fall by the wayside. It cost a lot of money, granted; but it was paid for by contribution, by all adults of working age and their employers. If all this sounds terribly socialist, it was; and it worked. I suspect many now won't recognise or understand that this is what their National Insurance contributions were originally designed for: to cover that very cost of providing cradle to grave care and support. Much like car tax, whose original purpose was obvious from its original name, the Road Fund License: a single fund to maintain the public highways for the public. Both are now just part of the taxation noise of life, stripped of their original, focussed functions.

The Welfare State came about because of need and inequality. Much like Universal Suffrage, the rights to health and wellbeing were, only a moment ago in historical terms, available only to the monied and owners of property; members of a certain class: the worthy whose wealth and positions were inherited but ultimately, historically stolen by force through conquests large and small: the worthy whose continued prosperity and lifestyle after the Industrial Revolution owed everything to the workers 'beneath' them actually creating their wealth and serving their every need, either paid or enslaved. This much is historical fact and the protests surrounding the BLM movement in recent weeks have highlighted much of this history. But where we are stopping short is in doing anything about the ongoing erosion of those basic rights that many generations fought and died to secure. An erosion increasing in speed with an acceleration matching our negative impact on our planet.

In both cases, there seems to be general apathy and a refusal to see, understand or actually do something about these erosions. I mentioned the other day that this seems to be a function of the increasingly bourgeois nature of modern society: a politics of comfort and aspiration. As long as certain commodities are in place, there's food on the table and the relevant social distractions are available to, well, distract; most people seem to feel little need to engage politically with the society they are actually part of. 'A Brave New World' rather than '1984'.

Meanwhile, the ground we live on is being eaten away from under our feet, both literally and metaphorically by the greed and ideology of a small, entitled and voraciously acquisitive clique who masquerade themselves in the invisibility cloak of respectability. And we seem as a society to be going along with the charade, choosing comfort and consumption as if there were no consequences to our actions. Considering most people are only a couple of pay checks away from living on the streets, it seems a very myopic viewpoint to have. The clique will still have their wealth, health and possessions and won't notice the bodies they step over on the pavements; at least not until their support services, food and energy run out because there is no longer anyone left to actually run the mechanisms of the world: the masses they so love to despise, marginalise and exploit having ceased to be, pushed to extinction by their machinations.

So, when did we cross that rubicon? Where can we lay the blame for the wanton destruction of our health and social care systems? Just who was it who turned us into a nation of compliant and largely unthinking consumers, being squeezed into ever tighter corners of borrowing to spend on ever-changing commodities and fads? The simple answer given is often the Thatcher government of the 1980's, and while granted they definitely did the groundwork, I think it's too simplistic a model and one which affords them too much 'credit' if that's an appropriate term. The reality as usual is far more complex and not just one political party has contributed to the current mess we are in. I include New Labour as well as the Liberal Democrats in this. They were both complicit in their way: power, personal ambition and greed as much a part of their remit in government or coalition as they are of the Tories', whose natural constituency they form.

As bad as Thatcher's government undoubtedly was, the current one is much more dangerous. It has a resolve not only to undermine the Welfare State and replace it entirely with private interests, something that all Tory governments seek ultimately to do anyway, but to undermine the apparatus of state itself. They are playing the politics of chaos: excising us from the influence and protections of the wider European state; dismantling those elements of the Civil Service that don't toe the party line and bringing those departments within their caucus and ultimate control; and all under the noses of a population largely divorced from the reality of their situation. Add in the comfort zone of a large parliamentary majority, a fragmented opposition and the complicity of most of the media and press; you get the picture: European history has recent form here.

That our domestic affairs and style of politicking is now writ large worldwide is more worrying still. It seems that the zeitgeist of fantasy and deniability is dragging us all as a species over the edge of a cliff eroding faster by the month; political chaos echoing climate chaos in a terminal feedback loop. No checks, no balances and unless the majority wake up to face it all squarely and do something, no hope.